Praise for Interior Design: Stories

“‘We actually turn ourselves inside out and find comfort in what we’ve imagined,’ one of the characters in the book’s title story says, and it’s that odd mixture of illusion and disillusion that makes Graham’s stories so compelling, that makes reading this collection a sad and utterly convincing encounter with one who can, like the magician pulling an endless string of knotted scarves from beneath his cuff, perform the fiction writer’s greatest feat–making us see through his eyes, compelling us to believe, without a doubt, in the world he has created.”
–John Gregory Brown, Chicago Tribune

“Philip Graham’s characters exist in worlds parallel to our own. It is as if the most ordinary and intensely familiar objects, actions and relationships are evoked, but with their meanings and significance rearranged. These stories represent a tour de force of imagination.”
–Janet Burroway

“Eight disturbing, elegant tales that plumb the obsessive powers of the imagination … Unique, somber terrain, precisely charted by a writer in absolute control of his material.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“Novelist and short story writer Graham fills his newest story collection with a sense of the power of imagination. One by one, his characters tap their own inventive powers to alter the troubling world around them … Quietly engrossing, Graham’s stories illustrate the ways our souls, craving meaning, instinctively make patterns out of experience–and that this process, whether heroic or neurotic, is not all that different from the work of an artist.”
–Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“Philip Graham’s new collection, Interior Design, is lyrical and complex and offers the reader the depth that a talented and original writer acquires with maturity. It is dazzling and insightful, a collection well worth reading again and again.”
–Oscar Hijuelos

“Graham’s prose is marked by truly masterly touches: exacting observations are rendered both forcefully in their import as well as refined and respectful in their tone. Intense, absorbing, graceful, and precise, these tales of our fin-de-siècle America announce that the most intense and powerful events are the ones we create ourselves. In an elegant and original manner Graham delimits the private blueprints of the unconscious–the delicate, unstable, and never certain boundary between the real and the imagined–to reveal that ’the true beauty … was that past, present and future bled into each other.’”
–Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, Review of Contemporary Fiction

“The collection is littered with examples of people shaping their experiences through imagination, basically turning themselves inside out. In “Angel,” a young man becomes emotionally paralyzed after his parents die and he obsessively imagines a guardian angel devouring his every thought. A pregnant woman spends hours mentally fusing her husband’s features with her own, creating a meticulous cognitive portrait of her unborn son in “Geology.” The narrator of “Another Planet” spends his childhood drawing imaginary continents on tennis balls, creating worlds where his family is always contented. The title story’s protagonist is an interior designer who works under the belief that objects are all bits of mind-made material and eventually tried to reshape her own life by decorating with materials culled from dreams and fantasies … Despite the thematic complexities, the lyrical story lines are disarmingly simple: tales of people dealing with death, crumbling families, and increasingly distant spouses. Many of the stories are also rather somber and dark, underlining Graham’s belief in the self-inflicted dangers threatening every individual.”
-Annabelle Villaneuva, New City Chicago

“The beautifully written story, “Angel,” comes from Graham’s most recent collection, Interior Design. This mainstream collection contains a number of stories that cross the line into contemporary fantasy … This is a beautifully textured book, and well worth seeking out for both its realist and fantasy tales.”
–Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Tenth Annual Collection

“The writer Philip Graham was born in Brooklyn, and yet the places that have exerted the strongest influence on his imaginative life, and hence his fiction, are West Africa and the Midwestern United States … Graham has lived in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, for the past two decades, but he’s also spent quite a lot of time in the Ivory Coast, supporting the research of his wife, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb. Africa informs every story he writes, Graham says, though virtually all his stories are set elsewhere … One normally wouldn’t pair the Midwest and Africa, but that’s why Graham sounds unlike any other writer you’ll encounter, why his stories are familiar and simultaneously extraordinary.”
–Robin Hemley, Turning Life into Fiction