Jayne Anne Philips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of six novels, including Night Watch, Quiet Dell, Lark And Termite, MotherKind, Shelter, and Machine Dreams, and two story collections, Fast Lanes, and Black Tickets, a debut that influenced a generation of writers. Twice nominated for the National Book Award, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. Awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, Phillips is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Her work has been translated into twelve languages and has appeared in Granta, Harper's, The New York Times and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. See information and text source photographs at her website, www.jayneannephillips.com.
This beautifully written revelation of the essence of The American Dream shines a light on the ways small towns created American girls, and the ways in which American girls created their small towns. And on this shimmers a brilliant Joycean layer of how places create writers and writers create place * Alice Randall, author of My Black Country * Small Town Girls is a brilliant, wide-ranging book, nostalgic and tough-minded at the same time. Like Willa Cather and Stephen Crane, Jayne Anne Phillips writes prose that reads like plainspoken poetry, full of startling and vivid images that bring a vanished world back to life before our eyes * Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers * Phillips's prose is unflagging in its beauty and rhythm, and the memoir-leaning pieces have a special glow... West Virginia has no more eloquent and grateful daughter. Boy, can she write * Kirkus, starred review * A sparkling introduction to the author for those who don't know her, and a peek behind the scenes of her life for those who do... A mosaic of her voices: humorous, scholarly, pensive, nostalgic * Booklist * Wonderful. . . . Equal parts wistful and pragmatic, Phillips's autopsy of rural mid-century America doubles as a haunting and insightful self-portrait. Even readers unfamiliar with the author's fiction will be riveted * Publishers Weekly, starred review *