...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? :-)
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.
What do You think about Black Tickets: Stories (2001)?
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.
—Teresa
Aside from "1934" and "El Paso" (which I add begrudgingly, as it did almost the same thing as "1934" except poorly), Black Tickets is a series of eye-rolling, "look at me using the word 'cunt' in the 70's" imagery stacked up on top of itself for no apparent reason. When Phillips can avoid talking about licking someone's thighs or wafting in the stars or grinding inside another being, she's not a bad writer. However, even when those moments come about, she more often than not ends up falling into the self-made trap that lots of amateur minimalists make, and her sparsity ends up saying less than it intends to.The second half of the book is lighter on the single page (and, even worse, twenty page) stories about orgasms and vaginas and other "edgy" topics, but it's too little, too late. Or, to be more accurate in describing JAP's sensory-overload, plot-less (and this coming from a Carver fanatic), sex-crazed style, it may have been too much too soon.
—Ryan Werner
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.
—Ellen
