Small Town Girls

OPRAH’S #1 MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026

“A bittersweet triumph. . . . Phillips’s new book is rich with evocative descriptions of her hometown. . . . Her love and respect for the people and their pasts, and for the splendor of the landscape, gives the writing at times the feel of a meditation, one that is ideally served by the eloquence and precision of the author’s prose. . . . One of the finest descriptions I have read of how a fiction writer’s mind works.” —Sigrid Nunez, New York Times Book Review

“Jayne Anne Phillips writes like a jeweler, setting each word like a gemstone.” —Here & Now/NPR

“Like a series of old photographs, the color-soaked images she conjures give her dreams a realness and her realism its dreaminess. . . . The effect is powerful indeed. . . . Like the best of Phillips’s fiction, its structure mimics the fracturing of modern American life as she has witnessed it.” —Wall Street Journal

“Phillips’s book is suffused with her love for where she came from and the memories of her ancestors.” —Boston Globe

★ “Phillips’s prose is unflagging in its beauty and rhythm, and the memoir-leaning pieces have a special glow. . . . West Virginia has no more eloquent and grateful daughter. Boy, can she write.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

★ “Wonderful. . . . Equal parts wistful and pragmatic, Phillips’s autopsy of rural mid-century America doubles as a haunting and insightful self-portrait. Even readers unfamiliar with the author’s fiction will be riveted.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

“A sparkling introduction to the author for those who don’t know her, and a peek behind the scenes of her life for those who do. . . . A mosaic of her voices: humorous, scholarly, pensive, nostalgic.” —Booklist

“A lovely, multifaceted memoir. . . . Radiant. . . . Impassioned. . . . At once nostalgic and clear-eyed. . . . Phillips brings to this memoir the kind of resonant details and sharp insights that have enriched her fiction. . . . ‘Writing, we cross the divide between self and others word by word.’ With Small Town Girls, Phillips has once again crossed that divide—beautifully.” —Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor

“A powerful example of Phillips’s immense talents. . . . Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, [she] deploys unique depth and eloquence.” —Alice Cary, BookPage

“What the film ‘The Last Picture Show’ began—Small Town Girls brings to fruition. This beautifully written revelation of the essence of The American Dream shines a light on the ways small towns created American girls, and the ways in which American girls created their small towns. And on this shimmers a brilliant Joycean layer of how places create writers and writers create place.” —Alice Randall, author of My Black Country

“A poignant and generous memoir. . . . Jayne Anne Phillips [is] the region’s greatest living writer. . . . Skipping around in time, taking in history as well as memory, these essays make a state famous for coal mines and a John Denver song seem like a stage all of us have crossed. . . . Phillips is at her wisdom-literature best.” —Pittsburgh Review of Books

“Small Town Girls is a brilliant, wide-ranging book, nostalgic and tough-minded at the same time. Like Willa Cather and Stephen Crane, Jayne Anne Phillips writes prose that reads like plainspoken poetry, full of startling and vivid images that bring a vanished world back to life before our eyes.” —Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers