[Black Tickets] bursts with original visions and primal energy….

[Jayne Anne Phillips's] stories about the old wring one's heart and illumine one's blindness toward the young, the afflicted, the dying, the unloved….

[These] are extraordinarily powerful stories. The first in the collection, "Home," brought the mother-and-daughter stories of Flannery O'Connor to mind. It is written in what might be called, in another art, plain chant; its prose rhythms are perfectly suited to the delicate balance of guilt, resentment, and love that exist between a mother and her grown daughter….

The story ends in a still picture, a photograph, the kind Phillips likes because it catches in one unsuspecting moment the essence of an entire event, even a lifetime. She includes in Black Tickets a number of these short, quick takes—vignettes that remind us of a camera that can take only one of the many possible pictures to...