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Epicurus.com - Black Tickets: Stories
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List Price: $13.00
Our Price: $11.05
Your Save: $ 1.95 ( 15% )
Availability: Usually ships in 1 to 3 weeks
Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375727351
ISBN: 0375727353
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2001-09-11
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2001-09-11
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: love/hate
Comment: I love and hate these stories, but mostly..I hate them. Maybe "hate" is putting too fine a point on it. I know Raymond Carver's wife gushed that "Black Tickets" was the "unmistakable work of early genius" but she and I must have read different books. These stories are, for the most point, pretentious and awkward. Come on--"the snowy Bible hums?" "Her breasts balloon, the sky opens inside them?" What the hell does that mean? I can't even visualize it. Kudos to Phillips for experimentation, but it doesn't work. I have to say that I do like "Lechery" and evidently so do many others, because it is heavily anthologized. "Black Tickets" is also compelling: bleak, black worlds these. Yet in the end these stories feel thin and undeveloped: abstractions rather than gritty experience.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Yes.
Comment: These stories encompass a range that is undeniable. Voices shift from young girls to young women mostly and occasionally to young men as in "El Paso." The narrative scope is tight and very intimately entwined. The landscape, family, and dynamics of character change constantly from story to story. These are gritty situations and people: displaced young women, strippers, a homeless madwoman, an orphaned child turned prostitute.
These are bottom-feeder stories-- youth without the rosy glow of hope, lackluster in faith. But despite the harrowing void in Phillips' writing, truth can be found here. These stories are full of the monsters that tear us down and that we give ourselves to as well.
The flash fiction in this collection is perhaps the most spectacular part of the book. They are quick portraits of girls and sometimes their families as in "Wedding Picture." Others take a more perilous turn as in "Under the Boardwalk," "Accidents," and "Slave." An overwhelming number of the stories are pocked with sexual deviation and marked with terror. There is something forceful about this exhumation of human depravity as if the author were excising skin and tissue and veins and clots just to show the reader the glimmer of a wet organ.
Phillips' details are mostly spot-on and daring. In one passage she compares the texture of a woman's skin to a "seeded strawberry." Phillips also has tight control of her pacing. She often writes as if cutting into the last sentence, as if the slideshow quickens and the pictures begin to move like a small home movie. However, this is not an easy collection. At times, reading her feels as if a pleasurable spot on the body is being stroked too hard, rubbed too long perhaps by even the wrong person.
This collection is original and the stories are frighteningly raw, sexually devious, and potent. She has a knack for honesty that is always bound to brutality. There are demons in these stories that perhaps will make us hope we had not woken.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "I suck you up like erasers"?????
Comment: This book hasn't aged well. There is very little plot, very little dialogue, and very few verbs. (Seriously, there are stretches of five or six "sentences" in a row with nary a verb to be seen.) There are some beautiful gems compacted into the dense prose, but for the most part Phillips crafted chewy, chunky, unwieldy sentences that don't give much pay-off for all the work you've done to decipher them. I have a Masters in literature, I have read and understood Ulysses, but I had to give up on many of the incomprehensible lines here. "I suck you up like erasers"? What?
The subject matter has aged poorly, too. In 2006, I'm neither shocked nor intrigued by Phillips's thinly veiled alter-ego's confrontation with her mother over birth control.
I can see why reviewers at the time were struck by the promise and poetry of her work; the story "1934" has the most plot in the collection, and is quite lovely. But is she, as Nadine Gordimer wrote, "the best short-story writer since Eudora Welty"?
Umm, no.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Didn't much care for it.
Comment: I didn't much cre for this book. It had too much sex stuff and not really any stories to follow. I thought it would be a good book, too since other well-known authors have praised it so well. I do not see what all the fuss was about.
Customer Rating:
Summary: didn't do it for me
Comment: i was excited to read this book. the enthusiatic reviews by so many upstanding authors made me feel i was about to embark on a journey into something forceful & important. instead, i found myself barely submerged in a lot of jibberish and unfocused monologues.there were 1 or 2 compelling stories in the book, but for the most part- i could have cared less. there wasn't anything about most of the characters that made me want to enter their worlds- i kept reading, hoping to find whatever it was the critics were raving about. needless to say, i never found it.
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