Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), a collection of stories which alternates longer developed fictions with poems and feverish vignettes, is the book which most resembles the structure and organization of Black Tickets. Phillips herself acknowledges a debt to Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and William Burroughs. Such erudition is typical of her writingworkshop generation, which tends to absorb material and styles from many sources. In Phillips's case, she tends both to find her material close to home, resulting in family stories, and to invent urban outcasts, resulting in the "outsider" stories. The family stories, occasionally Southern Gothic as in "1934," often dark dyspeptic narratives of rural or suburban America as in "The Heavenly Animal," are clearly influenced in choice of detail and texture by O'Connor, Welty, Porter, and Anderson. Welty's The Ponder Heart (1954), for example, treats similar material in the...