Jayne Anne Phillips’ first book of stories, Black Tickets, published when she was 26, won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Featured in Newsweek, Black Tickets was pronounced “stories unlike any in our literature…a crooked beauty” by Raymond Carver and established Phillips as a writer “in love with the American language.” She was praised by Nadine Gordimer as “the best short story writer since Eudora Welty” and Black Tickets has since become a classic of the short story genre. 

Machine Dreams, Phillips’ first novel, elegantly and astutely observes one American family from the turn of the century through the Vietnam War. “Reaches one’s deepest emotions,” wrote Nobel prize winner Nadine Gordimer. “No number of books read or films seen can deaden one to the intimate act of art by which this wonderful young writer has penetrated the definitive experience of her generation.” A New York Times best seller, Machine Dreams was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of twelve BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR.

Fast Lanes, her next book of stories, each told in extraordinary first person narratives that have been hailed by critics as virtuoso performances, was praised in the LA Times as “stories that hover on the edge of poetry.” Re-issued by Vintage, the new edition includes three previously uncollected stories, “Alma,” “Counting,” and “Callie.”

Shelter, her second novel, a haunting, suspenseful evocation of childhood rite-of-passage, was awarded an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Praised in the Washington Post as “Mesmerizing . . . the physical world — a girl’s camp in rural West Virginia – is so thoroughly and beautifully evoked that within pages we are completely drawn in,” Shelter deals with the “broken covenant between parents and their children” and the transition between childhood and adolescence. “Powerful…brilliant…Phillips writes it as a legendary quest . . .transformation, for Phillips, is the terror, magic and ordeal of what happens year by year as we grow out of childhood. She has set her remarkable novel at the mysterious crossroads where old safety, with its unexplained shadows, becomes more lethal than new danger, with its fearsome ventures.”

Her triumphant novel, MotherKind, the story of the first year in the life of a newborn infant and his mother Kate, and the last year of the life of Kate’s terminally ill mother who lives with them, examines timeless questions of birth and death. Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and short-listed for the prestigious Orange Prize (UK), MotherKind “explores the intuitive bond between mothers and daughters with unforced grace…throughout this compassionate and spiritually nourishing novel.” (Publisher’s Weekly)

Lark And Termite, set in the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea, is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us. At its center: seventeen-year-old Lark and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but full of radiance; their mother, Lola; their aunt, Nonie, who raises them; and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, who finds himself caught up in the chaotic early months of the Korean War. Told with enormous imagination and deep feeling, the novel invites us into the hearts and thoughts of each of the leading characters; even into Termite’s intricate, shuttered consciousness. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, finalist for the Prix de Medici Etranger (France), winner of the Heartland Prize, Lark And Termite was praised in the New York Times as “an intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr’s war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original.”

Phillips’ fifth novel, Quiet Dell, based on a true story, concerns the infamous 1931 murders committed in a hamlet of the same name near her hometown in West Virginia. Con man Harry Powers led a double life, and preyed on vulnerable widows he met through matrimonial agencies. He imprisoned and murdered an Illinois widow and her three children (ages 14, 12, and 9), and a Massachusetts divorcée, all of whom came to Quiet Dell willingly. The tragedy was one of the first nationally sensationalized crimes in America; the story preoccupied a rural town and the Depression-era nation for months. Quiet Dell boldly imagines the Illinois family’s last year of life, and gives us an indomitable heroine, Emily Thornhill, a Chicago reporter fascinated and compelled by the youngest of the children, and determined to see Powers convicted. Her relationship with the Chicago banker funding the investigation is as exhilarating as the crime is grim. Throughout the revelation of secrets both terrible and beautiful, Quiet Dell recounts the connections woven between us even in tragedy. A mesmerizing retelling of a harrowing true crime, Quiet Dell is a triumph. Publisher’s Weekly and the Wall Street Journal chose Quiet Dell as a Best Book of the Year.

Night Watch, Phillips’ sixth novel, is a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War. In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their lives. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives. The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their story: their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mystery behind the man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution. Epic, enthralling, and meticulously crafted, third in a trilogy of war novels that includes Machine Dreams and Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch is a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds, and a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath. Ken Burns, filmmaker (creator of the PBS series “The Civil War”) says: “There is a luminous beauty in Phillips’s prose. Whether it is the dark interiors of war—which have become her forte—or the equally complex and fraught lives of so-called ‘ordinary’ people, Phillips brings these theaters of peace and loss, death and transcendence together with a remarkable alchemy.”Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering, Death and The American Civil War calls Night Watch : “A searing portrait of the cruelties of race, the insanity of war, and the tragedy of its aftermath.”Alice Randall, author of Black Bottom Saints, says: “A profound meditation on identity, empathy, sanity, daughter-love, nature, and the Civil War, Night Watch will leave you shook  and sustained. This novel delivers fictional reckoning that makes way for the potential of real-world reconciliation by delivering complex and necessary testimony and confession. Weaving photographs and  fragments of non-fiction prose into an intimate family story, Night Watch is at once shatteringly particular and audaciously universal. Jayne Anne Phillips arrives at the crowning achievement of an extraordinary career.”