Philip Graham is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel How to Read an Unwritten Language, and the story collections The Art of the Knock and Interior Design. His non-fiction works are two memoirs of Africa (co-written with his wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb), Parallel Worlds and Braided Worlds, and a collection of travel essays, The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Washington Post Magazine, Missouri Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and is a core faculty member of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A co-founder of Ninth Letter, Graham has served as both the fiction editor, nonfiction editor and, for the magazine’s website, as an editor-at-large. You can read his on-going collection of literary craft essays at his author website: www.philipgraham.net
From the Archives: “One frustration of writing a single essay about David Jauss’s craft essays and short stories is that every one is worthy of its own in-depth examination.”
“With these folks, the trouble stews in the heart”: Jodi Paloni talks with Philip Graham about her debut story collection, They Could Live with Themselves (Press 53).
“History, personal or collective, weighs on everyone in these stories, sculpting their inner lives. And yet, Tabucchi suggests, an unlikely transcendence is possible.”
“It was tempting to allow those two characters in ‘Body Asking Shadow’ to find a way to communicate with actual language in the final scene, but in the end it felt both truer to the story and more interesting to let them communicate only through unlikely means, and to have that nonetheless suffice.”
In Part II of Philip Graham’s interview with John Warner, Warner talks about living a literary life online: “I seem to be congenitally incapable of making plans. This is often to my benefit. . . but it also has meant an extremely ad hoc career.”
John Warner talks to Philip Graham about giving his characters an extra graceful breath: “I see mankind basically as a pestilence, bent on destroying each other and the Earth itself. . . And yet, sometimes we can break free of our monstrousness and be genuinely good and kind.”
“One frustration of writing a single essay about David Jauss’s craft essays and short stories is that every one is worthy of its own in-depth examination.”
“Here’s a theory: To be a kid with a live mind is to be deluded and self-involved, but also curious and evolving at hyperspeed. To be insightful in surprising ways, totally off base in other ways, but never afraid to make sweeping pronouncements, like a little de Tocqueville in the Land of Adults.” Philip Graham talks with Bryan Furuness about his novel The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson.
Philip Graham talks with his former student, Ted Sanders, about Sanders’s debut collection No Animals We Could Name, the transcendence of the ordinary, the role animals play in his fiction, and his forthcoming middle-grade reader fantasy series, The Keepers, which will debut from HarperCollins next year with its first volume: The Box and the Dragonfly.
Marriage as ethnography: Philip Graham talks with Angela Woodward about her novel End of the Fire Cult, in which a man and woman invent competing civilizations that mirror their “real” lives.
Stories We Love: “55 Miles to the Gas Pump,” by Annie Proulx
Stories We Love: Donald Barthelme’s “The School,” In Which is Revealed the Meaning of Life
Stories We Love: "A Small, Good Thing" by Raymond Carver
Stories We Love: "The Fall River Axe Murders," by Angela Carter
capitalization as Stylistic Device
