Black Tickets: Stories [Paperback]

Jayne Anne Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 11, 2001

Jayne Anne Phillips's reputation-making debut collection paved the way for a new generation of writers. Raved about by reviewers and embraced by the likes of Raymond Carver, Frank Conroy, Annie Dillard, and Nadine Gordimer, Black Tickets now stands as a classic.

With an uncanny ability to depict the lives of men and women who rarely register in our literature, Phillips writes stories that lay bare their suffering and joy. Here are the abused and the abandoned, the violent and the passive, the impoverished and the disenfranchised who populate the small towns and rural byways of the country. A patron of the arts reserves his fondest feeling for the one man who wants it least. A stripper, the daughter of a witch, escapes from poverty into another kind of violence. A young girl during the Depression is caught between the love of her crazy father and the no less powerful love of her sorrowful mother. These are great American stories that have earned a privileged place in our literature.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Brilliant... Phillips is a virtuoso."
--Chicago Tribune Book World

"Extraordinary... Phillips shines brightly... This is a sweetheart of a book."
--John Irving, The New York Times Book Review

"[Phillips] knows how to write about the way dreams live with us... Genius is the word for her."
--The Boston Globe

From the Inside Flap

Jayne Anne Phillips's reputation-making debut collection paved the way for a new generation of writers. Raved about by reviewers and embraced by the likes of Raymond Carver, Frank Conroy, Annie Dillard, and Nadine Gordimer, Black Tickets now stands as a classic.

With an uncanny ability to depict the lives of men and women who rarely register in our literature, Phillips writes stories that lay bare their suffering and joy. Here are the abused and the abandoned, the violent and the passive, the impoverished and the disenfranchised who populate the small towns and rural byways of the country. A patron of the arts reserves his fondest feeling for the one man who wants it least. A stripper, the daughter of a witch, escapes from poverty into another kind of violence. A young girl during the Depression is caught between the love of her crazy father and the no less powerful love of her sorrowful mother. These are great American stories that have earned a privileged place in our literature.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (September 11, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375727353
• ISBN-13: 978-0375727351
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #40,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary, evocative book August 21, 2003

By "pietro25744"

Format:Hardcover

I read this book the first time in 1979 when it was published. I had never read anything like it. The young characters were all from my generation, did the things I did, and took the risks I took. I was very moved by this book. The prose evoked the rather disoriented late 1970s perfectly.

I went back and read "Black Tickets" again last summer and was pleasantly surprised to discover how evocative the book still is and how moving the language is. This book is a masterpiece.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A jaw-dropping debut June 30, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

These are staggeringly assured pieces and, as wonderful as her subsequent work has been, in some ways I don't think she's been able to top them. Marred only by an occasional tendency to use shocking subject matter for its own sake, these stories are punch-drunk on the precision and lush beauty of their own language. I don't think there is anyone currently writing in English whose prose is this gorgeous, or this gorgeously controlled. For me, she's like a female equivalent of Michael Ondaatje. Language to get lost in, but that never loses sight of the very human characters who use it, or whom it concerns.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Classic September 10, 2012

By Vincent Czyz

Format:Paperback

I first read Black Tickets nearly 20 years ago and for me, as a young writer, stories such as "Gemcrack" bordered on revelatory. I don't think I'd ever before encountered a style quite like the one I saw there--heightened prose but with considerably more polish than other practitioners of heightened prose--say Jack Kerouac or Henry Miller--had managed to pull off. I was not surprised to discover that Jayne Anne began as a poet since it was the language of Black Tickets that attracted me first and foremost
In addition to the exquisitely crafted sentences, Phillips performs a rare feat: She not only writes in several distinct styles, she has mastered them all. Most stylists--authors known for their lyrical power--have a single signature way of writing. Phillips, however, displays an impressive command of vernacular, heightened prose, naturalism, and maybe one or two varieties of writing that fall somewhere in between.
While I have new admiration for stories such as "Gemcrack," I was nearly flattened by "El Paso." The imagery, the lyricism tempered by vernacular, the rhythm--as palpable as handholds in a rock face--the dialogue, and the vortical ending (forgive the neologism, but I can't think of anything else that fits) fuse seamlessly. Here's an exemplary sentence: "The light rolling now, leaked into the dark, ripples the skin of the dark and flies fly up in loose knots; low slow buzz in corners yellowed and pulled out by the light that rolls across the surfaces of things in yellow blocks." The reader sees the light as almost solid, the dark filling corners, sees the knotty flight patterns of flies, hears their lethargic buzz, and consequently feels the dusty melancholy and intimated squalor of this room.
Perhaps the most stunning verbal performance in "El Paso" belongs to Rita, who says "Them stars are just holes in the sky after all. And while I'm sleeping in that hot bed, everything I ever thought of having falls into em." In two sentences we experience most of the despair that so often accompanies existence, a despair that Hemingway, with the sharpness of an unexpected blow, staggered us with in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." Another admirable aspect of this sentence is the way it inverts the trite use of stars as symbols of beauty, so that we have a visceral experience of the futility that is like a bed of ash Rita has slept on her whole life. A brief confessional from Rita's boyfriend, Dude, is also illuminating: "By noon those days I was a walking fever ... and since I first saw her I come into the heat the place the heat like a bitch dog and lived with it." As in Rita's quote, the off grammar makes the writing more specific (to both to character and place), more intimate, less bookish, more real. The deliberate omission of commas makes Dude's words more urgent and brings the reader closer to Dude's inner turmoil--we're just about in his guts. The repetition of "heat" works toward the same effect but also marks the metamorphosis from weatherly heat to body heat--all buildup for Dude's declaration of resignation: "and [I] lived with it." The lines in this story, in their compactness, in the way their small openings admit the reader to much larger interiors, in their vividness, tend to have more in common with poetry, which heightens the dramatic intensity of the story.
Like Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle, Black Tickets was a classic the same year it was published, a book that in and of itself is certain to guarantee Phillips's place as one America's most distinguished writers.