Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer has called Jayne Anne Phillips, “the best short-story writer since Eudora Welty.” Her books include Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter and the forthcoming Lark and Termite, her sixth work of fiction and first novel in nearly a decade. Comparisons to Faulkner are abound for the West Virginia native in this Bookforum review:

Phillips reinvigorates and transforms the Faulknerian infrastructure. Female voices, not the chorus of brothers Jason and Quentin, dominate in Lark and Termite. The relationship between Nonie and her promiscuous, more beautiful sister is exquisitely explored. At one point, for example, Nonie realizes that Termite “seemed the damaged mystery of everything I’d never finished with Lola, and the sadness of all that had gone wrong for her.” The importance of the women who are with Leavitt at No Gun Ri is vivid: One shoots herself and mistakenly triggers an American blitz; her relative, a young girl, saves Leavitt from the gunfire, pulling him away as the bullets miss him by inches. 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.”

Phillips, now in her second year as program director of the new MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University in Newark, comes to the Y on Feb 8 to lead a fiction master class (the deadline for submissions has been extended to December 11) and on Feb 9 she’ll join T.C. Boyle for a reading on the Y stage.