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Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is the author of four novels, Lark and Termite (2008), 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 twelve 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.
Phillips's depiction of a ravaged world in which so many have lost their way or had it stolen from them, both physically and mentally, feels true to the profoundly destabilising nature of her subject...With this excellent novel, Phillips has brought a little more of this foundational American episode into the light * Guardian * A haunting story of conflict with hope at its heart * Daily Mail * Beautiful, mournful... Carefully and engrossingly crafted... The good suffer equally with the bad. Phillips's artistic conscience won't let her flinch from this truth, but her generous heart won't let it be the last word. She leaves readers with a rueful yet doggedly hopeful maxim that could easily serve as an epigraph for Night Watch as a whole: 'Endurance was strength' * Washington Post * Intricately plotted... As Phillips shifts between the two periods and among her various characters' perspectives [...] she examines ideas about identity, rebirth, and lingering trauma * New Yorker, Books of the Year * Jayne Anne Phillips is a brilliant artist working at the height of her powers. Word by word, and line by line, there is no one better. This novel lives where a startling imagination meets scrupulous research: Night Watch is a tour de force - breathtaking in both its scope and intensity -- Tayari Jones, author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE There is a luminous beauty in Phillips's prose. Whether it is the dark interiors of war - which have become her forte - or the equally complex and fraught lives of so-called 'ordinary' people, Phillips brings these theaters of peace and loss, death and transcendence together with a remarkable alchemy -- Ken Burns, filmmaker A superb meditation on broken families in post-Civil War West Virginia . . . The bruised and turbulent postbellum era comes alive in Phillips's page-turning affair * Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW * Expect coincidences and convolutions . . . Phillips pulls them off with gorgeous prose, attention to detail, and masterful characters. Haunting storytelling and a refreshing look at history * Kirkus, STARRED REVIEW * A profound meditation on identity, empathy, sanity, daughter-love, nature, and the Civil War, Night Watch will leave you shook and sustained. This novel delivers fictional reckoning that makes way for the potential of real-world reconciliation by delivering complex and necessary testimony and confession. Weaving photographs and fragments of non-fiction prose into an intimate family story, Night Watch is at once shatteringly particular and audaciously universal. Jayne Anne Phillips arrives at the crowning achievement of an extraordinary career -- Alice Randall, author of BLACK BOTTOM SAINTS Jayne Anne Phillips is a wonderfully gifted storyteller, and few contemporary writers can match the lyricism of her prose, but in this marvelous new novel, largely set in a factual nineteenth-century asylum, she achieves even more: history and imagination merge, and she gives the past a living pulse -- Ron Rash, author of THE CARETAKER A lovely piece of work . . . Night Watch is another of Jayne Anne Phillips's intimate revelatory creations -- Dorothy Allison, author of BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA A searing portrait of the cruelties of race, the insanity of war, and the tragedy of its aftermath -- Drew Gilpin Faust, author of THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: DEATH AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR It's hard to know what to praise first - Jayne Anne Phillips' signature beautiful sentences, the compelling scenes of battle and their ravaged aftermath, the fascinating portrayal of Dr Thomas Story Kirkbride's 'moral treatment' method for the mentally ill, or the vivid depiction of the people and land of West Virginia in the 1860s and 70s. Night Watch takes a highly deserved place among important novels about war and its legacy -- Alice Elliot Dark, author of FELLOWSHIP POINT A story of trauma and restoration in the aftermath of the Civil War... Goodness is a real thing in this novel - a verifiable force - and the question posed is whether we still have the sensitivity to discern it * Wall Street Journal * Vivid . . . Phillips excels in crafting original takes on human circumstances, like mother-daughter relationships and women's vulnerabilities and resilience. Her setting here is equally striking: the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in rural West Virginia . . . The historical milieu comes alive in all its facets as Phillips evokes the enduring bonds of both blood and chosen families * Booklist * Tracing an arc from catastrophic damage and loss to recovery through the Civil War and its aftermath, Phillips marries a timeless emotional quality and utterly contemporary sensibility to create a satisfying work in her first novel in a decade . . . Night Watch is escapist in the best sense of the word, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the experience of a distant era and identify deeply with the struggles of the people who lived through it * BookPage * Phillips is meticulous in her depiction of a world devastated by division; the sense of the asylum as a place of sanctuary offers a modicum of optimism about an uncertain future * Observer *
