Jayne Anne Phillips was just 26 when her first book of short stories, the 1976 collection Black Tickets, was published to a howl of praise. Such sudden attention can be disorienting to a young writer, but Phillips says, “From the very beginning, I paid no attention. I felt that I had to protect myself.... So in some ways I probably didn’t take advantage of it as I might have. I just ignored it.”
With influences ranging from Arthur Rimbaud and William S. Burroughs to Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O’Connor, her lush, elegiac fiction also invokes William Faulkner’s Southern tales of fate, betrayal, and the burdens of history. In one of her short stories, “Country,” a character says, “This ain’t the South….This is the goddamn past.” As Malcolm Cowley wrote about Faulkner, her books “have the quality of being lived, absorbed, remembered, rather than being merely observed.”
