Gilbert is an American poet, editor, and critic. Below, Phillips discusses her life and writing career.

Phillips, 31, slender and lovely with brown hair parted simply in the middle and huge, intelligent eyes, is also the author of Black Tickets, a collection of short stories published in 1979, which won her instant critical acclaim and a large readership when it was translated into 12 languages.

Many of those stories were set in fictional Bellington, a small town in West Virginia like the one Phillips herself grew up in. Readers of Black Tickets will find in [her novel] Machine Dreams themes and incidents they remember from the short stories. Phillips has always been obsessed by the rootlessness of her generation and the accommodations families have to make to changing times.

"I didn't start out to write a novel," she says. "I had been meditating, brooding over some of the characters in...