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

Small Town Girls tells the family story, the community story, of one of today’s most admired and cherished authors: the Pulitzer Prize winner Jayne Anne Phillips. Don’t miss hearing from her and her book editor about this luminous memoir in essays—about the art of reflecting on your origins and the mysteries of memory.

Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. The distinctly American landscape of Appalachia—dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings—has been the great setting for her fiction. In this new work of nonfiction, in her distinctive first-person voice, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family and re-creates the place she calls home. She also ponders her relationship with inspiration, spirituality, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries. Tender, inviting, sparkling with wisdom and openheartedness, Small Town Girls is part coming-of-age story, part social history, and Jayne Anne Phillips’s most personal, most accessible book yet—a love letter to the place and the people who have shaped her perceptions and her writing. Don’t miss hearing from Phillips and Knopf editor Diana Miller about Oprah’s Most Anticipated Book of 2026, and an Editor’s Choice in The New York Times Book Review.

“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.” “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.” — New York Times Book Review

“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
 

Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, Quiet Dell, and Night Watch, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. Her work has been a finalist once for the National Book Award and twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Howard, Bunting, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Boston and New York.

Diana Miller joined Knopf in 2003 as editorial assistant to Robin Desser and Bob Gottlieb, later becoming associate editor to Sonny Mehta. Among the books she has published are Leila Mottley’s bestselling debut novel Nightcrawling, an Oprah’s Book Club pick; Joanna Quinn’s bestselling debut novel The Whalebone Theatre, a Read with Jenna pick; Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, Giller Prize winner, Booker Prize finalist, and one of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of the Year; and Yoon Choi’s Skinship, winner of the PEN/Bingham Prize for debut short story collection. Diana also works with Elliot Ackerman, Alaa Al Aswany, Jo Baker, John Banville, Javier Cercas, Richard Flanagan, Juliet Grames, Garth Risk Hallberg, Amitava Kumar, Priyanka Mattoo, Anne Michaels, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler, Alice Winn, and Evie Wyld.

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