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9780593804933

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Reviews

""What the film ‘The Last Picture Show’ began—Small Town Girls brings to fruition. 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

OPRAH'S #1 MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 “Jayne Anne Phillips writes like a jeweler, setting each word like a gemstone.” —Here & Now/NPR “Like a series of old photographs, the color-soaked images she conjures give her dreams a realness and her realism its dreaminess. . . . The effect is powerful indeed. . . . Like the best of Phillips’s fiction, its structure mimics the fracturing of modern American life as she has witnessed it.” —Wall Street Journal “Phillips’s book is suffused with her love for where she came from and the memories of her ancestors.” —Boston Globe ★ “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 Reviews (starred) ★ “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) “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 ""What the film ‘The Last Picture Show’ began—Small Town Girls brings to fruition. 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 “A poignant and generous memoir. . . . Jayne Anne Phillips [is] the region’s greatest living writer. . . . Skipping around in time, taking in history as well as memory, these essays make a state famous for coal mines and a John Denver song seem like a stage all of us have crossed. . . . Phillips is at her wisdom-literature best.” —Pittsburgh Review of Books ""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

Author Information

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, Quiet Dell, and Night Watch, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. Her work has been a finalist once for the National Book Award and twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Howard, Bunting, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Boston and New York.

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