[Black Tickets] bursts with original visions and primal energy….

[Jayne Anne Phillips's] stories about the old wring one's heart and illumine one's blindness toward the young, the afflicted, the dying, the unloved….

[These] are extraordinarily powerful stories. The first in the collection, "Home," brought the mother-and-daughter stories of Flannery O'Connor to mind. It is written in what might be called, in another art, plain chant; its prose rhythms are perfectly suited to the delicate balance of guilt, resentment, and love that exist between a mother and her grown daughter….

The story ends in a still picture, a photograph, the kind Phillips likes because it catches in one unsuspecting moment the essence of an entire event, even a lifetime. She includes in Black Tickets a number of these short, quick takes—vignettes that remind us of a camera that can take only one of the many possible pictures to record a person or persons, their lives or a moment in them. I think these are less successful than her longer stories because they allow her to indulge a certain fondness for ornate writing, which works less well than her stronger, more precise and simple rhetoric.

As I look over this book once more, I have the feeling that there is too much here, too much insight, too much unusual compassion for those who are lonely and cut away from human sympathy, especially those in the same family who are bound by parental ties, to be used up by a first book. I am more than willing to believe that with the publication of Black Tickets we have something to celebrate—and a writer to watch closely. (p. 9)