Acclaimed Short Story Writer and Novelist Jayne Anne Phillips To Give Reading at Bard College on February 23

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Acclaimed short story writer and novelist Jayne Anne Phillips will read from her work on Monday, February 23, at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema of the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Phillips is most recently the author of the new novel Lark and Termite (Knopf, 2009), of which Lorraine Adams writes in Bookforum, “Lark and Termite’s parallels with The Sound and the Fury are remarkable. Both novels employ four points of view and are sometimes told in stream of consciousness . . . Phillips reinvigorates and transforms the Faulknerian infrastructure. Female voices, not the chorus of brothers Jason and Quentin, dominate in Lark and Termite . . . While Faulkner chronicled the decay of the South through its men, Phillips adumbrates the nobility of Appalachia, of Korean refugees, of the least of us, by taking us into the ‘shaky territory’ of women and the ‘picture inside the roar, a tunnel inside the tunnel’.” Alice Munro describes the novel as “cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light.” And Robert Olen Butler writes, “Jayne Anne Phillips has the universal soul of an artist, and she is at the height of her powers in Lark and Termite, entering with absolute authenticity and compassion into the hearts and sensibilities of the members of a remarkable family, whose story from the middle of the 20th century reflects profoundly on our lives in the beginning of the 21st. This is a major novel from one of America’s finest writers.” Phillips will be introduced by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow. The reading, which is presented as part of Morrow’s course on innovative contemporary fiction, is free and open to the public.

Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is the author of four novels, Lark and Termite (2009), MotherKind (2000), Shelter (1994) and Machine Dreams (1984), and two collections of widely anthologized stories, Fast Lanes (1987) and Black Tickets (1979). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship. She has been awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (1980) and an Academy Award in Literature (1997) by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been translated into 12 languages, and has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, DoubleTake, and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She is currently professor of English and director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.

For more information about the reading, call 845-758-1539.

###

This event was last updated on 02-16-2009

Back to Top