Black Tickets: Stories (Paperback)

by Jayne Anne Phillips (Author)

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 -- Review

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

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: 8 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #170,788 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

This review is from: Black Tickets (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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	"pietro25744" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Tickets (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.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars love/hate, December 20, 2008

By	Julia M. Townsend (metairie, la) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I love and hate these stories, but mostly..I hate them. Maybe "hate" is putting too fine a point on it. I know Raymond Carver's wife gushed that "Black Tickets" was the "unmistakable work of early genius" but she and I must have read different books. These stories are, for the most point, pretentious and awkward. Come on--"the snowy Bible hums?" "Her breasts balloon, the sky opens inside them?" What the hell does that mean? I can't even visualize it. Kudos to Phillips for experimentation, but it doesn't work. I have to say that I do like "Lechery" and evidently so do many others, because it is heavily anthologized. "Black Tickets" is also compelling: bleak, black worlds these. Yet in the end these stories feel thin and undeveloped: abstractions rather than gritty experience.