Interior Design

Interior Design

STORIES

Philip Graham

BY PHILIP GRAHAM

Braided Worlds
(co-authored with Alma Gottlieb)

The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon

Interior Design: Stories

How to Read an Unwritten Language
(novel)

Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa
(co-authored with Alma Gottlieb)

The Art of the Knock: Stories

The Vanishings
(prose poems)

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

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1996 by Philip Graham All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Originally published in hardcover by Scribner, 1996.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graham, Philip, date.

Interior design: stories / Philip Graham, p. cm.

I. Title.

The following stories have appeared, some in slightly different form, in these magazines and/or anthologies:

“Beauty Marks” in
Apalachee Quarterly
, “Geology” in
Arrival
; “The Pose” in
The Chariton Review'
,

“Another Planet” in
Fiction;
“The Reverse” in
The Florida Review;
“Interior Design” in
Mid-American Review
; “Angel” in
The Missouri Review
and; “Lucky” in
The North American Review
.

“Angel” was the winner of the 1992 William Peden Prize for Fiction, and has been reprinted in
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Tenth Annual Collection
, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

“Interior Design” has been reprinted in
Turning Life into Fiction
, 2
^nd
Edition, edited by Robin Hemley.

The brief passage quoted in “Lucky” is from
Grays Anatomy
.

Cover image copyright by David Maisel

History's Shadow GM18
, 2010

www.davidmaisel.com

An introduction to the 2013 ebook edition of
Interior Design

by Roy Kesey

“The actual tragedies of life,”
says Jean Cocteau,
“bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.”

That quote, from the Rosamond Lehmann translation of Cocteau's novel
Les Enfants Terribles
, is so perfectly apposite to my intentions here that I almost wonder if I made it up. Philip Graham's short story collection
Interior Design
, first published by Scribner and Sons in 1996, has long deserved a new edition. There are many reasons why this is so, but here are three of the biggest: its bewildering simplicity, its grand design, and the element of the bizarre that inheres in it.

Graham has worn multiple hats the past few decades: travel writer and satirist, memoirist and book reviewer; university professor and magazine editor. I would argue, however, that it is his output in fiction broadly defined—his two short story collections, his novel, his prose poetry—that are most fundamental to us as readers.

Interior Design
is in fact the most recent fiction of Graham's long career. First came
The Vanishings
, a collection of prose poems published by Release Press in 1978. Next came his debut story collection,
The Art of the Knock
, put out by William Morrow in 1985; it included stories first seen in
The New Yorker
and
The Washington Post Magazine
, among other venues. Graham followed that up with his debut novel
How to Read an Unwritten Language
, put out by Scribner in 1995 and nominated for the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

While
Interior Design
has features that will be familiar to readers of Graham's earlier fiction, many of its stories grow on bones he first unearthed in the course of developing his nonfiction work. Together with his wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, Graham has written two memoirs addressing their years of research and life in West Africa:
Parallel Worlds
, published by Crown in 1993, and
Braided Worlds
, published by University of Chicago Press in 2012. These two books also bookend
The Moon Come to Earth
, a memoir of Graham's year with his family in Lisbon, first documented in the series of dispatches he wrote for the literary website
McSweeney's Internet Tendency
, and subsequently expanded for print publication by University of Chicago Press in 2009.

Several of the strongest stories in
Interior Design
apply Graham's anthropological insights and techniques to the raw material of American life as it was lived near the end of the past millennium. An interesting set of insights into this process is provided by Robin Hemley's
Turning Life into Fiction
(Graywolf Press, 2006). As Hemley notes, Graham's years among the Beng minority in Côte d'Ivoire provided him with a means of defamiliarizing himself with the cultures of his Brooklyn birth and Midwestern adulthood. Just as importantly, given what Graham had learned abroad, strange new fictional amalgams were possible upon his return. In the story “Angel,” for example, the Beng understanding of the afterlife overlays the American workaday world so as to address eternal issues of grief. In the title story, meanwhile, one aspect of the Beng sense of communal space is made manifest to an American architect's daughter, thus allowing Graham to explore domestic isolation more deeply than might otherwise be possible.

Graham the traveler is of course also Graham the artist. The characters in his stories must by needs come to terms with the oddnesses of contemporary existence, and in so doing, they often draw upon the same set of techniques—for example, the search for patterns to which worthwhile meaning can be assigned—that an author uses to create stories in the first place. As the main character of “Angel” posits, “Maybe we're compositions, evolving works of art for angels, and they're attracted to the elegant patterns they make of our fates.” This notion makes all of the characters artists in a sense; it is creativity, then, that will see them through to grace.

The collection begins with “Another Planet,” wherein a young boy spends his days creating make-believe continents, drawing them on the surfaces of tennis balls, seeking a space where familial happiness is possible, even as he looks past these tiny spheres at the sight of his father going to pieces. The theme of watching over continues into the second story, the aforementioned “Angel,” which won the 1992 William Peden Prize, and was included in the tenth annual edition of the anthology
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror
. Here, a boy is obsessed with the notion of guardian angels, an obsession that only grows deeper and more strange following the death of his parents.