David Jauss
"I consider What the Dead Can Say to be one of the best novels written in this century so far. It is extraordinarily ambitious, original, and just plain beautifully written.
An original and important addition to our literature, Graham’s novel is a very innovative take on the Bildungsroman—a genre usually defined as the story of a character's growth from childhood to adulthood—but it is wholly unlike any Bildungsroman ever written. Jenny, the novel's protagonist and narrator, is only three years old when she dies so her intellectual, emotional, and moral education takes place entirely in her afterlife."
"The novel is a ghost story, but again, it's not like any other that's ever been written. It's supernatural and suspenseful, sure, but there's nothing remotely Halloween-ish or Gothic or Stephen King-ish about it. The novel isn't designed to frighten or shock us, though Jenny does learn some frightening and shocking things about life that her early death prevented her from experiencing. She learns these things both by observing the lives of those who continue to live after her (including her parents and a sister born after she died) and by encountering nine other utterly fascinating ghosts whose stories contribute to her understanding of life and herself.
As all of this should suggest, What the Dead Can Say is just too good to miss. I urge you to read it. I believe you'll be as amazed and impressed by it as I am."
David Jauss is the author of Words Made Flesh and Glossolalia
Katherine Vaz
"What the Dead Can Say is a tour de force . . .what an astonishing, surprising, rich book! Each character or chapter contains its own voyage, and the result is a fine weave of souls. There is great swooping glee in the book but also an ease with magical thinking and a grounding in life's dailiness and countless secrets. Truly a sui generis work of art. I loved it."
Katherine Vaz is the author of Above the Salt and Fado and Other Stories
Ross Barkan
"The premise of Philip Graham’s stirring new novel is that there are ghosts all around us. Told from the perspective of alternating spirits but centering on Jenny, who fell down the stairs at age three and promptly died, What the Dead Can Say is one of the more remarkable meditations on death I’ve ever read."
"The afterlife is simply our world. The ghosts cannot be seen or heard by the living, but they are permitted to observe everything. A dead entomologist shrinks herself to the size of the ants she so loved in life. A dead newspaper reporter continues to carry out her own investigations, narrating exposés to herself. A man who died escaping slavery lingers around a town hundreds of years later, hoping for reincarnation in his homeland thousands of miles away.
The ghosts do not experience hunger or thirst, but they know love, sorrow, and even lust. Jenny is the 'hungry' ghost, able to absorb the stories of the spirits she comes into contact with, gaining wisdom far beyond the short years she experienced when alive. Her power—and ultimate burden—is to watch over the childhood and adolescence of the sister she never met, the child her parents conceived after her death. Graham is an elegant writer, his craft and care evident; I was tugged, happily, all the way through."
Mary Cappello
"What the Dead Can Say is a masterwork of vast beauty and imagination. Philip Graham’s novel plumbs the depths (and heights) of the mercurial unknown that lives inside the hidden corners of our lives but that we fail to see. I love the book’s utopian dream—that we can arrive at a place of understanding of human difference in all of its particularity, we can know each other if only we could find a way. The book invites us into the consequences of something fundamental to life on earth that we don’t seem to have the means to understand, and that is the ways in which memory is a vastly entangled share among and between humans."
"The ghosts of What the Dead Can Say bleed into each other’s (after)lives, learning from one another, empathizing, as if to say, it is possible for humans to understand each other.
I love how the stories curl inside of each other, or how they serve sometimes as strata for one another, sometimes off-shoots, sometimes hidden plates of influence and intersection. There is so much that is breathtaking, including a sensibility that grants us the complexity and beauty of human souls intertwined should our spirits be open to it, in this world or 'the next.'"
Mary Cappello is the author of Life Breaks In and Called Back
Miriam Sagan
"An elegantly designed book. No author. No blurbs. No promo. The book almost feels like a piece of small sculpture, intact in itself. This is What The Dead Can Say. And now we know the author is writer Philip Graham (novelist, memoirist, editor). For a year, the book was as mysterious as the life-after-death of its theme. It appeared as if by magic in Little Free Libraries all across the country. Any reader who picked it up felt 'found' in some mystic way."
"An incredible—innovative, DIY—publishing project, it has now come 'out' in every way, so it doesn’t just have to find you—you can find it, in its new digital form! The novel, with its ten characters in search of…life, death, a story… is on my favorite terrain—how do the living and the dead interact? Does our tale die with us? Are the dead and living really so different? And how does death enhance life?"
Miriam Sagan is the author of A Hundred Cups of Coffee and Border Line: 101 Haiku
TJ Price
"What the Dead Can Say is a wondrous, shifting kaleidoscope of a book. Told first from the perspective of a young girl (Jenny) who has died in a tragic accident and gone on to inhabit an afterlife that is superimposed upon the world of the living, the chapters cycle through stories of those other inhabitants of this unseen world as Jenny comes in contact with them. She learns that, by touching them, she amalgamates their stories—their lives, their knowledge—into her being, and so learns and grows with every encounter. And this is a staggeringly diverse cast of ghosts. Each character is treated with care, observation, and deep sympathy."
"In essence, What the Dead Can Say functions as a novel-in-stories, linked together by the inquisitive Jenny. Voices commingle and overlap, sometimes harmonic, sometimes dissonant, but by the end of the book a chorus has developed, amplified by the thoughts and feelings of the reader themselves. Jenny is almost a personification of the novel which contains her. She is its soul. The book goes through the world, touching each new reader that it happens by, and absorbs their story, just as she does to the other ghosts of her afterlife.
When I turned the final page, I felt as if I, too, had been touched by Jenny, that my voice (however silent) had become a part of her. I felt so much connection with Jenny, her quest, and each of the spirits of those she met along the way. What the Dead Can Say transcended that ineffable, spiritual realm to reach across the gulf into this one, and I felt its vibrations as keenly as a plucked string."
TJ Price is the author of The Disappearance of Tom Nero.
Michele Morano
“A straight-up ghost tale, this delightful novel takes readers on a journey through life as we know it with an otherworldly narrator who, right here in our midst, cannot help but collect other ghosts’ stories as she moves through the mortal world. It’s a beautiful, fascinating—dare I say haunting?— book.”
— from 3 Quarks Daily
Michele Morano is the author of Like Love and Grammar Lessons
Leanne Ogasawara
"I was so captured by Philip Graham’s What the Dead Can Say project. This is his eighth book. He has published books with Random House and Scribner, and fiction in The New Yorker. So, yeah, he achieved great success. And then he decides to do something fun!"
"He arranges to privately print a 1,000-copy limited edition run and then to give away every copy. The books are like works of art, so this was a true labor of love . . . and then how does he give them away? Well, he makes a 10,000-mile journey through 28 states to deposit copies in Little Free Libraries!
It’s fun and totally inspiring.
Dutch medievalist and historian Johan Huizinga argued that play was, until the 18th century, a fundamental mode of our being-in-the-world. That is why he says we are not homo sapiens–nor are we, as Nietzsche suggested, homo fingens. Human beings, living within their narratives and stories are fundamentally homo ludens."
Leanne Ogasawara, “Art and Play” in her Substack Dreaming in Japanese
Christine Sneed
"[Years ago] I read one of Philip Graham’s story collections, Interior Design (initially published by Scribner in 1996 and reissued by Dzanc Books in 2014). His characters were wonderfully, thornily human. His most recent book, What the Dead Can Say, is likewise a work of depth and beauty...”
— from "Rethinking Publishing from the Ground Up: A Conversation with Novelist, Editor, and Critic Philip Graham" Bookish
Christine Sneed is the author of the novel Please Be Advised and the story collection Direct Sunlight.
The Millions: "A Mystery in the Shape of a Book," by Philip Graham
"On a gravel road outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, I stood before a Little Free Library painted the colors of the Pride flag. How had it arrived here in this deep-red state, so seemingly exposed and yet declaring itself with such self-assurance? This little library, which offered books and their stories for any passerby, must itself be a story.
I opened the library’s glass door and placed a fresh copy of my latest novel, What the Dead Can Say, on the bottom shelf. Then I returned to the car. For months my wife and I had been driving around the country, dropping off free copies in hundreds of Little Free Libraries. Now, we turned back on to the main road and headed down to Colorado, in search of more.
What the Dead Can Say is my eighth book. Over the course of my career, I’ve published books with Random House and Scribner, and fiction in the New Yorker. But for this most recent novel, I was no longer interested in chasing the prestige that such literary icons confer, no longer wished to jump through traditional publishing’s increasingly narrowing hoops. Instead, I decided to privately print a 1,000-copy, limited-edition run—then undertake a 10,000-mile journey through 28 states to give away every copy."