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Phillips, Jayne Anne

Her new novel, Lark & Termite, published by Knopf on January 6, 2009, is "a rich, wonderfully alive novel from one of our most admired and best-loved writers, her first book in nine years.  Lark & Termite is set during the 1950s in West Viginia 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." - Random House, Inc. 

Comments on Lark & Termite include the following: 

"Lark & Termite is extraordinary and it is luminous.  This is not simply Jayne Anne Phillips.  This is something far more extraordinary.  It is an astounding feat of the imagination.  It is the best novel I've read this year."  - Junot Diaz

"This novel cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light." - Alice Munro

"What a beautiful novel this is-so rich and intricate in its drama, so elegantly written, so tender, so convincing, so penetrating, so incredibly moving.  I can declare without hesitation or qualification that Lark & Termite is by far the best novel I've read in the last five years or so." - Tim O'Brien

"Jayne Anne Phillips has the universal soul of an artist, and she is at the height of her powers in Lark & Termite, entering with absolute authenticity and compassion into the hearts and sensibilities of the members of a remarkable family, whose story from the middle of the 20th century reflects profoundly on our lives in the beginning of the 21st. This is a major novel from one of America's finest writers." - Robert Olen Butler

For reviews, interviews, author readings/events schedule, please go to:

http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375401954

You can read other Lark & Termite reviews by clicking on the following links:

New York Times Review

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/books/06kaku.html?_r=1&scp=8&sq=jayne%20anne%20philips&st=cse

Elle Magazine Review

http://www.elle.com/Entertainment/Books/Jayne-Anne-Phillips

Narrative Magazine Interview

http://narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2008/writing-teaching-and-her-new-novel

Jayne Anne Phillips was born and raised in West Virginia. Her first book of stories, Black Tickets, published in 1979 when she was 26, won the prestigious Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Featured in Newsweek, Black Tickets was pronounced "stories unlike any in our literature... a crooked beauty" by Raymond Carver and established Phillips as an writer "in love with the American language." She was praised by Nadine Gordimer as "the best short story writer since Eudora Welty" and Black Tickets has since become a classic of the short story genre.

Machine Dreams, Phillips' first novel, published in 1984, elegantly and astutely observes one American family from the turn of the century through the Vietnam War. A New York Times best seller, Machine Dreams was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of twelve Best Books of the Year.

Her next book of stories, Fast Lanes, (1987), praised in the LA times as "stories that hover on the edge of poetry," was reissued by Vintage and includes three previously uncollected stories.

Shelter, her 1994 novel, a haunting, suspenseful evocation of childhood rite-of-passage, was awarded an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and chosen one of the Best Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly.

MotherKind, “a compassionate and spiritually nourishing novel,”(PW) tells the stroy of Kate, whose care for her terminally ill mother coincidees with the birth of her first child and the early months of a young marriage. She must, iin a single year, come to terms with profound loss and radiante beginnings. Motherkind, which “explores the intuitive bond between mothers and daughters with unforced gracee,” was nominated for the Orange Prize (UK).

Jayne Anne Phillips' works have been translated and published in twelve languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Her work has appeared most recently in Harper's, Granta, Doubletake, and the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She has taught at Harvard University, Williams College, and Boston University, and Brandeis University. She is Professor of English and Director of the Rutgers Newark MFA Program. Her books are available in Vintage paperback.

Author’s Website