Black Tickets: Stories

by Jayne Anne Phillips

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 American 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 modern literature.

Wedding picture --
Home --
Blind girls --
Lechery --
Mamasita --
Black tickets --
The powder of the angels, and I'm yours --
Stripper --
El Paso --
Under the boardwalk --
Sweethearts --
1934 --
Solo dance --
The heavenly animal --
Happy --
Stars --
The patron --
Strangers in the night --
Souvenir --
What it takes to keep a young girl alive --
Cheers --
Snow --
Satisfaction --
Country --
Slave --
Accidents --
Gemcrack

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Literature, Classics, Flash Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 1979

About the author

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, and Quiet Dell. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bunting Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Winner of an Arts and Letters Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2018. A National Book Award finalist, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she lives in New York and Boston.

Reviews

[Garima · Rating 5 out of 5]

...the girl half dazed on sidewalk falls over, lays down like she’s home.

Black Tickets is a book of startling confessions, refuted sins and daring apathy. It’s beautiful, unsettling and reckless. It’s an acerbic masterpiece which recoils at the thought of refinement and perfection. It belongs to a different world- a world of cheap motels and flickering neon lights, of broken homes and failed road trips, of stifling love and unfathomable desire. It’s like a foreign movie that seeks stories in closed bars and communicates the stench of empty bottles. Like the person with a new address every day, it indulges in unabashed wanderlust.

She drove fast the first few hours. The sun looked like the moon, dim, layered over.

It’s like those solitary travelling in the early hours of morning when night and day dissolves into indifference. It’s a cul de sac that ends up in ambiguity. These are the heavy thoughts that tread on transparent, thin ice. In the garb of rational persona, the wavering minds are directing their own rebellious scenes here. There is a sickening irresolution about life but commendable conviction about all those bad ideas. Here the strangling seems a lesser evil than giving birth. The vocabulary that defines the lives of these people is completely different from mine. The words mostly rhyme with filth, madness and longing. There is beauty but that of a morning glory. It’s enough.

Them stars are just holes in the sky after all. And while I’m sleeping in that hot bed everything I ever thought of having falls into em.

It’s like a musical riddle with teasing directions. I felt myself receding into an unfamiliar territory of impersonal and mysterious kind. Maybe this is as real as real gets but it’s one frightening reality. The words are embedded within small space while leaving generous margins but that hardly warrants understanding of these stories. The characters mostly remain in a fugue state and those who are conscious are deliberately driving towards the maelstrom of false emotions that urge them to carve up a dreamy fairy tale. If only there was a prince charming in waiting.

Surrounded by the blur of her own movements, the thought of making him happy was very dear to her. She moved it from place to place, a surprise she never opened. She slept alone at night, soul of a naked priest in her sweet body.

Jayne Anne Phillips is a sexy Flannery O’Connor, a blunt Carson McCullers and the ever poetic and powerful, Adrienne Rich. And you haven’t read her yet? :-)

[Metaxy99 · Rating 5 out of 5]

If someone asked me to describe Flannery O'Connor as music, I'd refer them to classic blues and hard-edged folk like Son House and Leadbelly and early Dylan.

If someone asked me to describe Jayne Anne Phillips' Black Tickets as music, I'd sit her down with a playlist that included a narrow band of blues/post-blues tunes infused with rock and punk, like Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac doing I Loved Another Woman , Catpower singing Robert Johnson's Come on in My Kitchen , PJ Harvey doing Dylan's Highway 61, Catpower again doing Tom Waits' Yesterday is Here , Lightnin Hopkins doing Katie May and Frisco Blues, Rickie Lee Jones doing the Hendrix tune Up From the Skies, Patti Smith doing This Dead City.
Hard tunes, substantial and sad, close to the bone and tingling the flesh, mainly sung by women who have a way of making the substance occur as deceptively ethereal.

You could call it edgy, but it wouldn't capture the meditative, dream quality of these stories - it's as if Tarkovsky parachuted onto the set of an early Scorsese film. Highly condensed tales of dislocation and yearning and glimmers of transcendence, crafted as well as anything from the poets, it's fucking magic. It hurts.


a sample that doesn't give anything away, just a little glimpse of the ground Phillips covers here:

The sewing woman lived across the tracks, down past Arey's feed store. Row of skinny houses on a mud alley. Her rooms smelled of salted grease and old newspaper. Behind the ironing board she was thin, scooping up papers that shuffled open in her hands. Her eyebrows were arched sharp and painted on...

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this because I read that her style was an inspiration to William Gibson when he wrote Neuromancer. Maybe. It's a bunch of short stories told in stream-of-consciousness. I could guess at origins & where they would go afterward, but these were ugly snapshots. A very little went a long way. For instance, one of the early stories is a young girl (12?) thinking about the people that she will & has had sex with.

I didn't care for the style, although since they were short stories, stream-of-consciousness worked better than in a novel. The subject matter ran the gamut from depressing to totally repugnant. Were there any bright spots? I have to admit to skimming more & more.

I'll agree that the pace was headlong & the pictures were clearly painted, but they were just too ugly for me to look beyond them to enjoy the style. My overall rating is yuck, don't inflict this on yourself.

[Algernon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of us walk in the black slant. A shadow falling from a long place is cast across us. Perhaps we will meet at night, in an alley beside a club.

Jayne Anne Phillips is selling tickets to a dark carnival. Watch the parade of drifters and misfits, the homeless and the loveless, the abused and the abandoned, bar hoppers and runaway children, pole dancers and drug addicts. She tells the histories of the people history ignores, the ones that fall through the cracks in the pavement, who are swept under the rug and become invisible to polite society.
These are timeless tales, although many of the stories can be tracked down to the Great Depression, of going lean in a nothing town as one young man recounts. They are private, intimate tales – secret, sensual, eerie and broken like the lives of the narrators. Most of them are not about regrets or pain, although there are regrets and pain to spare, but about yearnings like snowflakes falling over burning desert

Love is the outlaw’s duty.

But if you give them that, it costs them nothing to be friends with you.
Why should it cost? The only cost is what you give, and you can tell if someone is giving it back.

The search for love leads often to some of the darkest places of the mind, to physical abuse or violence or alienation. When love goes missing, the search turns to drugs, or to watching vintage stag movies, to promiscuity or self-inflicted wounds.

There is no guidelight, no Ariadne’s thread for the reader to follow down these dark alleys. Some stories are just sketches, one page long or even less, recording an emotion, a state of mind, a cry for help. Others are family sagas, mapping out the link from parent to child, the need of belonging, the return to an age of innocence from the dark rooms of the present. For me, the stories included in this collection somehow melted down into one story, told and retold in different voices but, in the end, a single wide landscape, painted in the darkest colours, ... a picture of trains dark slashed on tracks, and behind them the sky opens up like a hole. :

... textures of black: black of thick tar, black of satin, corduroy black, waxen and petaled black of death masks, orchid black, black of cashmere beds and the moonless impetigo night, cancer black and black of inheritor insects, black of wet rope and burns and black and black and black I saw in your icy throat.

Phillips is my kind of writer. Because poetry is no longer in fashion or considered the pinnacle of literary art, she writes her poetry in prose, using the same care for the power of words and imagery as a miniaturist illuminator of medieval parchments, telling tales from the years of the plague.

Could tell easy she was one to leave home over and over till her feet wore down to a root that just planted where she ran out of steam.[...] She had that hard crumpled look of a dame that’s been around but don’t know why.

They say the world ends in fire and ice; I say it’s already over. That hot pavement burns you straight through; that’s why I did it, kept moving – no slow cooking and my claws raking walls. These streets, raunchy brass, my feet on fire burns up that dead ice.

I can see clear out there to the end and I’m alone I’m burning like a fire fuel. I’m hot. I’m hot like I’m a streak across the sky. You watch me, now bring me down hard and hold on. It doesn’t matter if I tell one truth or another. I wanna feel a hand on my waist.

You see me everywhere. I spit on the surface of night, on the rattling backdrops of subway gutter art. I suck you up like erasers. I am that glittering drop of mercury spilled out of a broken glass stick.

It’s not fair to pick favorites from this collection of darkness, but I would still like to mark down the titles that I loved best:

El Paso
1934
Black Tickets
Strangers in the Night
Souvenir
Country
Gemcrack

I hope to add more titles from Phillips soon, maybe starting with her recent Pulitzer winner for historical novel Night Watch

[tee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I live to find books like this. I don't know what I want to do with my life other than find those books that make you vibrate with excitement - this was one of those books. Sometimes it feels like I'll never find another book that hits me hard, ever again and then I do and my faith is restored. The only reason I want to live to be old, old, old is so that I might find every good book in the world and experience what I felt with reading this, it was amazing.

Some of the stories lost me but I think that had more to do with my lack of focus than anything else but there were several stories that pained me because they were so good. I don't dog ear pages in my novels but this one has quite a few. There's nothing I can say to convey how much I loved this book. I can't even write a proper review because I'm still flushed and dumb struck with awe.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ground-breaking, brilliant, masterful.

I'm sure many writers have been inspired by the stories in this collection. Phillips published these stories in the 70's, the style of which now seem to be all over the internet. I have to admit that there were two stories that befuddled me at their ends (as a lot of these short-short stories in general seem to do to me) but I still think that's my lack of perception and not the author's fault.

Two of the stories also seem to have the same female lead character but with different names (and even have the characters relating the same anecdote unless I'm confusing that with Machine Dreams which I read recently) , but that's a very minor quibble; I'm sure these numerous stories were written over a span of many years.

The strength of Phillips' writing is in her amazing way of painting a complete picture with just a few words -- absolutely amazing.

I loved "1934" and "Snow," and the final story left me breathless.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm embarrassed to say I had not read the complete book before, just the shorter stories in various anthologies. While I had always enjoyed her brief ones, I was blown away by the longer ones. I can only imagine why this book is not taught more in Lit classes, perhaps because of the very gritty content, but it should be. It's a real lesson on what can be done with the English language and with narrative voice. I was less entranced by the title story than by some of the others, such as Country. Simply brilliant.

[Laura Toto · Rating 5 out of 5]

If anyone is interested where poetry meets prose, this is where it begins. Astonishingly forward and musical. The beat, the hum of her writing, it is like the beating of one's heart.

[Abbe Gemma · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is written very poetically, so at times it was hard for me to fully grasp what was happening in the stories. I feel like I would definitely benefit from a second read, but I also just don’t see myself wanting to read this again anytime soon lol

[Richard Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

So thrilled to have found JAP. She certainly gives Mary Gaitskill a run for her money. Dark, sexy, surreal stories, this was a real joy to read. Also, this must have been some of the first flash fiction, back in 1975. Great collection, off to read more of her work.

[David Ressel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ok. another rule-breaker.. read this one AGES ago, but I just added Christie Malry's Own Double entry, because it was one of the few books that made me laugh out loud (and to cry as well), and on that flip side, I add, Jayne Anne Phillips's short story collection, Black Tickets.
As the book-track of my life goes this is a huge milestone. As I recall, I stumbled upon this as a junior in high school, i think I had just gone to a reading by Harlan Ellison (who! a story for another time!), and there was announcement for JAP's reading of this work. I never made it, but it came on the radio, and well I was mesmerized. I can modestly say, that I was a precocious reader (to which i have not always been served well, I read some things much too young, and missed a lot, and I also missed out volumes of material for the younger reader that I never really gave a shot).. but still another day for that.

but this book hit me as a landslide. a landslide like Stevie Nicks's song and a real one. Emotional stories that hit the gut, and hit the gut hard. At the time I was just learning about acting and a character and Stanislavsky and Uta Hagen and never thought fiction could duplicate a real performance or the real itself. I even gave a copy of this to one of my most influential teachers (in memoriam Nancy Donohue), I read and re-read these short stories and really wanted others to get it. so much yearning, loss, need that you are forced to despair and and I hope find others to reach out to... eventually I found Carver, others (let's through Nick Cave in there and some TC Boyle just because i want to) but this was one of the first that really showed me adult feeling and reactions and concepts and i have no idea, but I know no one else who heard of it, and well that is wrong. I had read other deep books, but chiefly from other eras.. (Holocaust books, Zola, Byron, other so-called classics of the human condition) but this one hit me. hard. once again, i give my guarantee. if you buy it and don't like it, I will reimburse your and sign you up for a heart transplant.

[Lynne Favreau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jayne Anne Phillip’s collection of short stories Black Tickets were touted as “original” and “the best since Eudora Welty” and “early genius” upon first publication in 1979.

In 2008, I didn’t find them to be all that compelling or original, but that may be a sign of the times. I just don’t believe that if these were published today for the first time they’d inspire the same accolades. And isn't that the test of a classic, standing the test of time?

The use of shock and rawness as a literary device used in some of these stories was valid and useful when written but have lost their effectiveness.

Phillips characters fall either to the side of immorality and their victims: the drug dealers, sluts, loners, raped, abused, confused, or they are the sweeter narratives of relationships between parents, children and siblings. Where she was more successful at engaging me was with the straight forward story telling of familial relationships. These classic family dramas were worthy of the accolades Snow and Souvenir.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is her first collection. With early stories, there's a sense of adventurousness--but there can also be pretense and self-indulgence. Some of the stories are so oblique and almost intentionally confusing that I found myself wishing a given story would end. The technique is hit and miss. Phillips often writes about sex--the dirtier and sleazier the better. There are no cotillions or country clubs in these stories; they're all set in the worst parts of the worst towns. I like that.

What I don't like is relying purely on style, atmosphere and setting. The details are good--poetic even--but most of these stories are just vignettes. It's useful to consider that approach as a writer, when revising or expanding scenes, for example. But when I have to re-read a section five times just to figure out what the hell is going on--I get frustrated.

Still, there's much to admire here and a few things to emulate.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing was pretty but wow it made me feel dumb.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up a few weeks ago because of the Pulitzer victory. Knew of Jayne Anne Phillips but had never took the plunge….until Black Tickets. Wow. Faulkner’s stream of conscious brilliance, the grit of Harry Crews, the emblazoned zeal of Flannery O’Connor, the stark, spare realities of Raymond Carver, and something wholly and originally Jayne Anne Phillips. West Virginian. Brutal. Musical. Pure. Poetic parables and prophecies. Knockout scenes & vignettes, fiery stories, mini novels or slim, sylph-like novelettes? Either way…they stand like golden monuments. How did I miss this?

5 star bliss: Something to return to etermally. Just for the wonder. Essential.

[Jenny]

“The war ended too soon. She didn’t finish her training. She came home only to nurse her mother and to meet my father at a dance. She married him in two weeks. It took twenty years to divorce him.”


“I did all I could, she sighs. And I was glad to do it. I’m glad I don’t have to feel guilty.
No one has to feel guilty, I tell her.
And why not? says my mother. There’s nothing wrong with guilt. If you are guilty, you should feel guilty.
My mother has often told me that I will be sorry when she is gone.”

“Eating, she thought about sex and chewed pears as though they were conscious.”

“I’m not sure anymore when the first accident happened. Or if it was an accident. Now when I tell you about my accidents you are sympathetic and some of you fall in love with me. Men whose childhoods were slow and smooth want my straightjacket stories. My sugar is a panic that melts on your tongue and leaves a tiny hole in what you taste.”


Written in 1975. JAP was born ‘52 in WV.

[John Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jayne Anne Phillips is one of a kind. i don't always know what to make of her stories.
This is her first major collection and so much of the content is depraved, lascivious, seedy, etc--unbelievably/uncomfortably so at times. Who are these people?! But no one has a language and sense/perception like hers. You wonder where it comes from; how did she ever learn to describe the physical world so uniquely, especially how it colors our interactions and experiences. I honestly read sentences over and over to get a greater sense of her art. It's not advanced vocabulary, and it's not that it's just poetic, which is certainly part of it. it's more like the logic of dreams, dream language -- nonrational but hitting something elemental.
Some stories merit a reread, but others are throwaways.

Home
El Paso
1934
The Heavenly Animal
Souvenir
Snow [wow]

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gloriously weird. Damn.

[Matthew Bettencourt]

favorite stories: “Home,” “The Heavenly Animal,” “Souvenir,” and “Gemcrack.”

[Chuck Sherman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just read the Pulitzer Prize winners and saw this author won for fiction2024. I had never heard of her but sounded interesting; didn’t like paying $26 for a hard copy, but the article I read about the author said she was the author of the “criticality acclaimed “ book of short stories: Black Tickets”. Ok, I’ll bite. Found a used copy for five bucks and when I open it upon arrival, I see it’s a SIGNED copy. What an amazing portent! Alas, I did not like this book. Her language is beautiful, kind of poetic; but don’t you hate reading a story and all you can think is: I don’t know what happened.
The majority of these stories are little vignettes that express an emotion or a sense without any indication of who these people are or what they are doing or why I should care.
Over half the stories were literally one page.
Anyways, now I don’t really have a desire to read the Pulitzer winner, until someone I know reads it and says it was ok.
Maybe the portent was:”why would someone sell an author signed book written by a Pulitzer Prize winner for five bucks (free shipping)”?

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of this was slow-going for me (aside from "Home"); and I struggled with what sort of rating to give this book.
With some of the stories ("Lechery," "Black Tickets," "El Paso," and many of the short-shorts) a lot of the action seemed buried under names and weirdness and poetry; I've seen this done in more recent collections as well, but somehow better?
However, things did improve later on, "Gemcrack" was written in the same style as the aforementioned stories but the elements came together better; "Slave" tells an entire story in two pages quite well; and "The Heavenly Animal," "Snow," and "Country" are my favourites in the book (I also enjoyed "1934.") So 4 stars seems fair, and I'm glad I got to experience the diversity of Phillips' writing style.

[Kat Saunders · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were a handful of stories that I thought were particularly good--usually the ones involving mothers and daughters. The best evoked Bonnie Jo Campbell's most recent collection of short stories, but unfortunately, I found much of the rest overly written, obscure, repetitive, and dull. I love great flash prose, and I think some of the ones included here were occasionally great. But many just left me wondering, "So what?" Many of the better ones seemed to be gesturing towards something interesting, but then the pieces just ended abruptly.

This is the second book I've read by Phillips, and I just don't think I'm a good reader for her work. Someone else will likely find much to love about this.

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection walks a tightrope wire of dense, lyrically visceral prose. As such, it is a bit uneven. Certain stories sing with a meld of memory and present, others seem too unmoored. Many of the stories are so brief that they seem to be portraits: a quick, charcoal sketch, drawn in furious haste. I have mixed feelings on whether or not they are successful.

Still, I give this collection 4 stars because when it works, it really works, and I found myself provoked and challenged, even by the lesser stories.

[Bridget · Rating 1 out of 5]

Books don't just consist of words on a page, every reader brings their own life stories, perceptions and context to every book they read. That may be why I did not enjoy "Black Tickets". I was reading these short stories in various doctors offices, E.R.s and hospital rooms. I don't recommend this as hospital reading. It's dark. Even I could see that the author does a good job with parent/grown child relationships, and certain stories were strong, but the rest felt like swimming in mud.

[Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection of short stories that exhibit impressive economy. Sparse punctuation, no quotes, plenty of fragments. Often stories lasted no more than a three paragraphs over two pages. A must-read for any one interested in the art of conveying more with less.

[Patrice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard, hard short stories written by a native West Virginian. They speak to the lives of our most disenfranchised and they are disturbing. I will probably re-read at some point because I could sense an arc to the stories that may merit further exploration.

[Udai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well it was a little bit hard for a non English reader
They were confusing thoroughly descriptive
Super strong very shattering
Super depressing and some stories you just wish they'd stop
It was like listening to nails scratching on a chalk board while bathing in shit rain and fire

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unremittingly, almost ceaselessly grim. But you can almost hear the sentences crunch as she tries to sound "literary."

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

thought I'd added this but obvioulsy not. Great collection of hard hitting v. short stories. Read in the 80s alongside Carver, Ford et al..

[Brett Ramsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like a three-hundred page punch to the face and I savoured every blow. Jayne Anne Phillips is a dominatrix of the English language.