Small Town Girls

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 *

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.

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