Jayne Anne Phillips Books In Order

Machine Dreams

In her highly acclaimed debut novel, the bestselling author of Shelter introduces the Hampsons, an ordinary, small town American family profoundly affected by the extraordinary events of history. Here is a stunning chronicle that begins with the Depression and ends with the Vietnam War, revealed in the thoughts, dreams, and memories of each family member. Mitch struggles to earn a living as Jeans becomes the main breadwinner, working to coplete college and raise the family. While the couple fight to keep their marriage intact, their daughter Danner and son Billy forge a sibling bond of uncommon strength. When Billy goes off to Vietnam, Danner becomes the sole bond linking her family, whose dissolution mirrors the fractured state of America in the 1960s. Deeply felt and vividly imagined, this lyrical novel is ‘among the wisest of a generation to grapple with a war that maimed us all’ The Village Voice, by a master of contemporary fiction.

Shelter

In a West Virginia forest in 1963, a group of children at summer camp enter a foreboding Eden and experience an unexpected rite of passage. Shelter is an astonishing portrayal of an American loss of innocence as witnessed by a mysterious drifter named Parson, two young sisters, Lenny and Alma, and a feral boy called Buddy. Together they come to understand bravery and the importance of compassion. Phillips unearths a dangerous beauty in this primeval terrain and in the hearts of her characters. Lies, secrets, erotic initiations, and the bonds of love between friends, families, and generations are transformed in a leafy wilderness undiminished by societal rules and dilemmas. Cast in Phillips stunning prose, with an unpredictable cast of characters and a shadowy, suspenseful narrative, Shelter is a an enduring achievement from one of the finest writers of our time.

Motherkind

A major new novel that depicts the challenges of family life with contemporary force and timeless grace, from the acclaimed author of Machine Dreams and Shelter. Formerly free spirited, unattached Kate enters into roles of enormous responsibility: as she takes the first steps into a new marriage complete with her own beloved infant and two lively young stepsons, she becomes caregiver to her ailing mother, the strong woman who has been her guiding star and counterpart across a divide of experience and time. Kate must, in a single year, confront profound loss alongside radiant beginnings. Jayne Anne Phillips transforms quotidian details into a shimmering whole, giving us Kate and her family in all the complexity their world offers. Phillips renowned skill at portraiture combines with her equally nuanced sense of narrative in this heartstrong and delicately layered novel.

Lark and Termite

A rich, wonderfully alive novel from one of our most admired and best loved writers, her first book in nine years. Lark and Termite is set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea. It 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, two children: Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk but filled with radiance. Around them, their mother, Lola, a haunting but absent presence; their aunt Nonie, a matronly, vibrant woman in her fifties, 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 deep feeling, the novel invites us to enter into the hearts and thoughts of the leading characters, even into Termite s intricate, shuttered consciousness. We are with Leavitt, trapped by friendly fire alongside the Korean children he tries to rescue. We see Lark s dreams for Termite and her own future, and how, with the aid of a childhood love and a spectral social worker, she makes them happen. We learn of Lola s love for her soldier husband and her children, and unravel the mystery of her relationship with Nonie. We discover the lasting connections between past and future on the night the town experiences an overwhelming flood, and we follow Lark and Termite as their lives are changed forever.

Black Tickets

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.

Fast Lanes

Jayne Anne Phillips has always been a master of portraiture, both in her widely acclaimed novels and in her short fiction. The stories in Fast Lanes demonstrated the breadth of her talent in a tour de force of voices, offering elegantly rendered views into the lives of characters torn between the liberation of detachment and the desire to connect.

Three stories are collected in this edition for the first time: in ‘Alma,’ and adolescent daughter is made the confidante of her lonely mother; ‘Counting’ traces the history of a dommed love affair; and ‘Callie’ evokes memories of the haunting death of a child in 1920’s West Virginia. Along with the original seven stories from Fast Lanes each told in extraordinary first person narratives that have been hailed by critics as virtuoso performances these incandescent portraits offer windows into the lives of an entire generation of Americans, demonstrating again and again why Jayne Anne Phillips remains one of our most powerful writers.

The Last Day of Summer

The photographs of Jock Sturges are the record of people he cherishes: mothers and daughters, friends, children. Before his 8 x 10 camera, they show their relationship not only to one another, but also of the inner self to the world. Magical in their detail, these images are a collaboration of trust and admiration between artist and subject. Jayne Anne Phillips’s compelling prose both illuminates the photographs and explores the unending sensuality and complexity of the bond between mother and child. Whether photographing on naturist beaches in the south of France, in the communes of northern California, or in the affluent, East Coast summer resort of Block Island, Jock Sturges is at home with his subjects. Many of them are families with whom he has deep ties and whom he photographs as they are, clothed or nude, revealing the iconography of family affection. Each summer Sturges returns to visit the friends whose uninhibited grace, warmth, and beauty he so lyrically captures. He is now making pictures of girls and boys whose parents he first photographed as children. In 1990 the Federal Bureau of Investigation entered Jock Sturges’s San Francisco studio and seized his work, implying violation of child po*rnography laws. Citizens, artists, and the media responded with outrage. With The Last Day of Summer, Aperture accords to Jock Sturges’s humane and lovely vision the dignity and respect it so richly deserves.