Jayne Anne Phillips

My review of Quiet Dell, the new novel by Jayne Anne Phillips, can now be read in The Oregonian. Phillips' entire body of work is remarkably beautiful and moving, from the inimitable stories in Black Tickets (1979) to this newest masterwork. She's one of our very best.

...Her fearlessness is brilliantly and relentlessly evident from "Black Tickets" onward, whether she's writing about wild sexuality (a recurrent theme), about the numb grisliness of war, or peering through the spectral lens of extreme disability, as in her unforgettable rendering of a mentally retarded boy's muffled cognition and ultra-lucid consciousness in 2009's "Lark & Termite." Phillips is a preeminent anywhere-goer of contemporary American literature. ...