A dispatch from a foreign land, when crafted by an attentive and skilled writer, can be magical, transmitting pleasure, drama, and seductive strangeness. In "The Moon, Come to Earth", Philip Graham offers an expanded edition of a popular series of dispatches originally published on McSweeney's, an exuberant yet introspective account of a year's sojourn in Lisbon with his wife and daughter. Casting his attentive gaze on scenes as broad as a citywide arts festival and as small as a single paving stone in a cobbled walk, Graham renders Lisbon from a perspective that varies between wide-eyed and knowing; though he's unquestionably not a tourist, at the same time he knows he will never be a local. So his lyrical accounts reveal his struggles with (and love of) the Portuguese language, an awkward meeting with Nobel laureate Jose Saramago, being trapped in a budding soccer riot, and his daughter's challenging transition to adolescence while attending a Portuguese school - but he also waxes loving about Portugal's saudade-drenched music, its inventive cuisine, and its vibrant literary culture. And through his humorous, self-deprecating, and wistful explorations, we come to know Graham himself, and his wife and daughter, so when an unexpected crisis hits his family, we can't help but ache alongside them. A thoughtful, finely wrought celebration of the moment-to-moment excitement of diving deep into another culture and confronting one's secret selves, "The Moon, Come to Earth" is literary travel writing of a rare intimacy and immediacy.

"A good part of the reason I feel so passionately positive about The Moon, Come to Earth is how well Graham is able to convey his compassionate, generous, and comic spirit to the reader. Unfailingly endearing, whether he's trying to figure the number of cobblestones in Lisbon or trying to find an ATM to buy tickets for a futebol match, Graham becomes the reader's traveling surrogate in the best sense. But this book is as much about parenthood as it is about Portugal, with Graham's daughter Hannah as the most constant figure in the narrative. The portrait of this father-daughter relationship is about as lovely as l've seen." - Robin Hemley, author of Do-Over!"

Philip Graham is the author of two short story collections, The Art of the Knock and Interior Design, and a novel, How to Read an Unwritten Language, and is coauthor of a memoir of Africa, Parallel Worlds. He teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Vermont College of Fine Arts.