Twenty-three years old, alone, broke, and without options, a young woman returns to her mother’s home. There, while the television drones and her mother laments the aging of Walter Cronkite, Hubert Humphrey, and her own body, the young woman has endless hours to relive her life with her high school boyfriend. When a former lover and Vietnam medic Daniel comes to visit her, it will be the first time a man has entered the home in a very long time.
Jayne Anne Phillips captures the quiet, searing awkwardness between a mother and daughter, scarred by their past relationships, memories of lost intimacy, and conversations they could never share. A classic of the genre, “Home” and the other stories comprising Black Tickets were pronounced “unlike any in our literature...a crooked beauty” by Raymond Carver.
Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is the author of four novels, Lark and Termite (2008), MotherKind (2000), Shelter (1994) and Machine Dreams (1984), and two collections of widely anthologized stories, Fast Lanes (1987) and Black Tickets (1979). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship. She has been awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (1980) and an Academy Award in Literature (1997) by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, and has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, DoubleTake, and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
View titles by Jayne Anne Phillips
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A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection
Twenty-three years old, alone, broke, and without options, a young woman returns to her mother’s home. There, while the television drones and her mother laments the aging of Walter Cronkite, Hubert Humphrey, and her own body, the young woman has endless hours to relive her life with her high school boyfriend. When a former lover and Vietnam medic Daniel comes to visit her, it will be the first time a man has entered the home in a very long time.
Jayne Anne Phillips captures the quiet, searing awkwardness between a mother and daughter, scarred by their past relationships, memories of lost intimacy, and conversations they could never share. A classic of the genre, “Home” and the other stories comprising Black Tickets were pronounced “unlike any in our literature...a crooked beauty” by Raymond Carver.
Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is the author of four novels, Lark and Termite (2008), MotherKind (2000), Shelter (1994) and Machine Dreams (1984), and two collections of widely anthologized stories, Fast Lanes (1987) and Black Tickets (1979). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship. She has been awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (1980) and an Academy Award in Literature (1997) by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, and has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, DoubleTake, and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.
View titles by Jayne Anne Phillips