Buckhannon, West Virginia, gave Jayne Anne Phillips her first landscape and her lasting subject. In this memoir in essays, the Pulitzer winner returns to the town, her mother and the making of a writer.
Readical Key Points
- Starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly; a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
- A memoir in essays by the author of Night Watch, awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2024
- Subjects include Appalachian small-town life, her mother and family, reading and writing, and writers such as Stephen Crane and Breece D'J Pancake
- Hardcover from Knopf, 208 pages
The book moves between memoir and social history. Phillips returns to her childhood and family, above all her bond with her mother, and to the ties that held the town's women together. Other essays follow her out of West Virginia and into her life as a reader and writer, with portraits of the writers who shaped her and forays into regional history, the Hatfield-McCoy feud among them.
Readers of her novels will recognize the ground under Machine Dreams and Night Watch. It also suits readers of Appalachian writing, literary memoir and books about the writing life. It is a book about a town, written by the novelist who has kept returning to it in her fiction.
About the Author
Jayne Anne Phillips's books include Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Lark and Termite, Quiet Dell and Night Watch, the 2024 winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and, twice, for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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