British photographer Paul Graham always manages to hit that elusive triple point of grit, beauty, and luminosity, so it's no surprise that the short stories of Chekhov were the inspiration behind his new book. Actually, the plural is in order, because a shimmer of possibility consists of books, 12 of them in fact, and no two are alike--at all.

Each of the volumes contains a photographic short story of quotidian American life. Open one and find 60 pages of photos taken at a single street intersection; follow another to a Texas garden, where a child dances the afternoon away with a plastic bag. It's a choose-your-own-adventure world in which things move at the speed of life: in turn seeming to stand still, ooze by, or pass in the blink of a shutter.

We realize that there's only a shimmer of possibility that you'll opt for the $10,000 special edition (which features a lovely box and a signed C-print), but the regular version is pretty special itself and breaks down to a little over twenty bucks a book. In other words, it's a shimmering sure thing.

Tonight Graham is celebrating the book(s) launch with a party at Salon 94 Freemans in New York City from 6-8pm. Graham's publisher, Steidl, refers to the books' contents as "filmic haikus," so we'll take the hint:
1 Freeman Alley
Just off of Rivington Street
See Paul Graham shimmer.