Fast Lanes
   
 
click to enlarge

What they said about Fast Lanes:
“The author's sympathy, her ability to imagine herself into the feelings of very different kinds of people, in no way lessens a precision that we are more used to finding at cooler temperatures. . . . The stories in Fast Lanes frequently hover on the edge of poetry.”
–Los Angeles Book Review
“One of our most fascinating and gritty writers. . . . [Phillips's] keenest asset is her ear, her ability to make art out of the desperate nervous voices in the nether corners of America.”
–The Washington Post
“Phillips is first-rate at first-person narration. In Fast Lanes she adopts distinct voice after voice, and she's equally adept at all of them.”
click to enlarge
–USA Today
“Phillips weds a bittersweet, lyric prose style with stories that count on our hearts. Scenes from these stories will haunt me for a long time.”
Swedish translation
–Chicago Tribune
click to enlarge
“Judging from this collection, it seems as if there's nothing Phillips can't do . . . a tremendously talented writer working to the limit of her powers.”
–Publishers Weekly
“Phillips has a gift. . . . She resists literary voices to discover real ones. . . . In the streets, the rooms, the truck cabs of her own time, Phillips fares well—in no small part because she hears well.”
British edition
–St. Louis Post Dispatch
click to enlarge
“Phillips sustains her myriad voices until their words roll with the angry cadences of sex or music. . . . It's a kind of dream surfing. . . . A writer of immense perception, her world view tarnished and yet undiminished by the fragmented reality she presents.”
–The Boston Globe
Danish translation
Fast Lanes is a collection that you'll remember having bought, immediately after you read it, for the pain and discomfort and often pulsating beauty it brings. Years later you will remember it as that volume by the writer Jayne Anne Phillips, who may well become one of our national treasures . . . You can see the talent grow and flex its muscles and open its throat to reach notes in practice that few of us get to hit when trying our hardest at the height of our powers. . . From the smallest point (beautiful sentences such as this one: “The pale salve of the polish was drying to a chalky glaze on the spoons . . .”) on through the largest issues (the way this writer can make you feel love and desire and pain and the mournfulness that comes of conjuring up lost times), Phillips weds a bittersweet, lyric prose style with stories that count on our hearts.”
click to enlarge

©2000 J.A.Phillips - text & images unless otherwise noted

© 2000 Nimworks Design - web site design

Dutch translation
click to enlarge
Alan Cheuse, The Chicago Tribune
Top of Page
Finnish translation