SOURCE: “K-Mart Realist Goes to Summer Camp,” in Manchester Guardian Weekly, Vol. 152, No. 6, February 5, 1995, p. 28.

In the following review, Brownrigg asserts that Phillips exhibits her talent for presenting the dark side of life in Shelter.

It was 1982, and the cool girl I knew had a series of books on her shelf—Of Grammatology, the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, The Bluest Eye, and Jayne Anne Phillips's Black Tickets. These together seemed like tickets to a life as a tough and critical American reader.

When I read Black Tickets, I understood why it had made the cut. Phillips may have been counted among the ranks of the “K-Mart realists” (as Tom Wolfe dubbed that era's writers) because she wasn't doing magic realism and she wasn't trading purely on her age, though she wrote Black Tickets in her twenties. But those extraordinary short fictions—of an edged life in El...