Title: Interior Design
First published: 1996
Description: Each of us carries an interior design, a secret personal world where we allow ourselves to explore our most private hopes and fears. In Interior Design, Philip Graham presents a gallery of people who, for all their strangeness, seem deeply, touchingly familiar.

When Bradley's parents die suddenly, he is tormented as much by their absence as he is by the thought that their guardian angels, now reassigned to other people, have taken his parents' secrets with them. Haunted by this disturbing idea, he becomes obsessed with his own angel and lives each day with the belief that someone always jealously hovers at his side, hungry for his every thought.

Elsewhere, a young boy lies awake at night listening to his parents' bitter arguments over his father's struggling shoe business. Huddled under his covers with a flashlight, the boy draws maps of imaginary planets on tennis balls, creating little worlds where his troubled family is somehow always happy.

Mysterious, tender, and sometimes frightening, these stories are fueled by the conviction that what moves us most in our lives are our deepest secrets and that our most intense adventures are the ones we create within ourselves.
Subjects: New York Times reviewed, Short stories
LC classification: PS3557.R217 I58 1996