Brown is an American critic, journalist, and author of several children's books. Below, he commends Black Tickets for its memorable surrealistic tone.

The short stories, prose poems and surreal vignettes that comprise Black Tickets read like comments on life from one who has stood graveside with Samuel Beckett and nodded mournful agreement as he intoned, "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries."

The 27 "cries" recorded by Jayne Ann Phillips in this her first publication, especially those of young women and teen-age girls, are reproduced with perfect pitch.

"Wedding Pictures," more a succinct three-paragraph poetic description than a story, introduces us, fugue-like, to the themes of emptiness, estrangement and despair which resonate through each succeeding page. From the incipient misery of children in...