Philip Graham, a Professor Emeritus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels How to Read an Unwritten Language and (as Author Unseen) What the Dead Can Say, and the story collections The Art of the Knock and Interior Design. He has also written a collection of travel essays, The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon and is the co-author, with his wife, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, of two memoirs of Africa, Parallel Worlds and Braided Worlds His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Washington Post Magazine, North American Review, Paris Review, Missouri Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. A co-founder and fiction/nonfiction editor of the literary/arts journal Ninth Letter, he is currently the Editor-at-Large for the journal’s website (www.ninthletter.com). Email: p-graham [at] illinois.edu
Website: https://www.philipgraham.net/
by Philip Graham While Mary Cappello’s Frost Will Come may seem, at first glance, to be about the stages of death (specifically, the death of her mother Rosemary Cappello, whose “soul was gloriously Rubenesque”), it is also a book that is vibrantly about life; about caring and obligation; about love’s varied and complicated revelations; and…
by Philip Graham In December of 2025, Miriam Sagan published a stunning merger of memoir and fantasy fiction, Mother of Assassins: A Memoir of the Imagination. In a conversational prose that is deceptively simple, this short book weaves together what is remembered and what is imagined with such uncanny glue that at times they can’t…
by Philip Graham Set over a single weekend, Thammika Songkaeo’s novel Stamford Hospital (Penguin Random House SEA, 2025) follows a woman who hospitalizes her barely ill child—not out of neglect, but exhaustion—using the institution as a temporary refuge from her life. Songkaeo’s writing examines what happens when care becomes confinement, and when love is no…
by Philip Graham In the first part of our conversation at 3 Quarks Daily, the writer Kipling Knox and I spoke of the parallels of our recent books: dappled with ghosts, in similar Midwestern landscapes, they’re also fictions that are expanding into world-building versions of themselves. From there our conversation has turned, in Part 2,…
by Philip Graham I’m still amazed that Kipling Knox was my student during the mid-to late 1980s, the earliest days of my teaching at the University of Illinois. A more-than-promising creative writing undergraduate student, he then went on to live his professional life in the tech and editing worlds before embarking on a literary career…
by Philip Graham When William K Gillespie was a student in one of my fiction writing workshops at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s, he turned in a brilliant, 36-page (single spaced!) story. A story absolutely typical of his talent and ambition. In the following years William went on to study under and…
by Philip Graham Archipelago, the third novel by Natalie Bakopoulos, ranges among the Cycladic Islands of Greece, the coast of Croatia, and crosses the borders of various Balkan states until finally—temporarily?—settling in a small town in the Peloponesian peninsula. All this traveling echoes (and is echoed by) the inner journey of the unnamed (and yet…
by Philip Graham Ross Barkan is certainly having a moment. His third and most ambitious novel, Glass Century, set in New York and encompassing over fifty years of the city’s history, has recently been published and is enjoying a raucously enthusiastic critical reception. I wasn’t surprised by the praise for Glass Century. Having been a…
by Philip Graham A conversation between Christine Sneed and Philip Graham Since 2010 Christine Sneed, winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (among other awards), has published six acclaimed books: the story collections Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry, The Virginity of Famous Men, and Direct Sunlight, and the novels Little…
by Philip Graham For over twenty years I have been in awe of David Jauss as a writer, as a colleague and teacher, and above all for his insight into the contradictory human heart. His short stories have been gathered together in two essential collections, Glossolalia and Nice People, and many of these stories, I…
A conversation between Philip Graham and Michele Morano: Michele Morano: Philip Graham has long been one of my favorite writers to read and to teach because of his insights, humor, and ability to challenge what we think we see. A versatile author of fiction and nonfiction— whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris…
by Philip Graham Margot Livesey’s The Boy in the Field is a mystery novel in the broadest sense of that literary term. Yes, the novel begins with the discovery of a crime, and the perpetrator remains at large for most of the narrative. Yet the “what happened next” of a standard mystery novel concentrates on…
by Philip Graham It’s the middle of July, 2020, the middle of a heat wave in the middle of the pandemic, and my first day in the radiation room. I stand in socks and starchy hospital gown before the Star Trek-ish linear accelerator, waiting for the technicians to fit me on the machine’s bed-like tray…
by Philip Graham I am a writer, not a musician. I play no instrument, and I confine my singing to the car when driving alone. Yet my momentary career as a musical performer—exceedingly brief as it may have been—enjoyed a spotlight rarely offered to others. Public acclaim is simply the last step in a long…
by Philip Graham I discovered my ideal radio station by accident. In the fall of 1979, my wife Alma and I took up a brief week’s residence in the Paris apartment of a friend, a pause before we’d fly to West Africa and then live in a small upcountry village in Ivory Coast for over…
by Philip Graham Whenever I discover a band that sports an accordion in the lineup, I’m ready to listen. But this wasn’t always so. It all goes back to the mid-1960s, those days of my mid-adolescence, when my father’s favorite cousin, who we called our “aunt” May, came to visit nearly every weekend. The year…
by Philip Graham I’ve long been partial to Portuguese culture, so when Portugal transferred its last colonial holding, Macau, back to Chinese rule in 1999 , a friend surprised me with his marveling reaction: “Portugal had an empire? Who knew?” Perhaps his reaction shouldn’t have surprised me. In the United States, steeped as we are…
by Philip Graham In the early months of 1966, whenever a familiar look of boredom settled in my mother’s eyes at the thought of cooking, I’d suggest, “Why don’t we go out for pizza?” She always agreed. Our pizzeria of choice was conveniently located on a one-block strip mall less than a mile away, between…
by Philip Graham Back in 1971, I couldn’t have predicted that the release of Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, Blue, would mark the beginning of the end of a friendship. During my college years, Donald and I had bonded over a love of literature and a shared ambition to become, some day, actual writers. While I…
by Philip Graham Michele Morano’s first collection of essays, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain, is a classic of travel literature that I have taught several times, to the great pleasure of over a decade’s worth of students. Now she has bested the power of that excellent book with a new collection of essays,…