Critics have compared Robert Phillips's storytelling ability in his
first two collections, Land of Lost Content and Public Landing
Revisited, to deMaupassant and Sherwood Anderson. All the
stories are set in a mythical small town called Public Landing.
Publishers Weekly said: "Phillips's vision of small town America
in the '50s and '60s is simultaneously jaundiced and nostalgic . . .
both funny and agonizing in its complex mingling of hope and
humiliation" and found "flashes of brilliance throughout."
	
    For the past decade Robert Phillips has continued to write stories
about Public Landing. But he also has been writing a series of
related stories concerning an urban protagonist with the surname of
Fallick. News About People You Know shuttles between the rural
DelMarVa Peninsula and New York City and its northern suburban
commuter communities, alternating the bucolic with hectic. In
Fallick, Phillips shows us an entirely new side to his fictional
imagination.

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Delaware native ROBERT PHILLIPS is the author/editor of some
thirty books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and letters. He is the
recipient of numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize and an
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in
Literature. Phillips writes poetry reviews for the Houston Chronicle
and is the poetry editor of the Texas Review. Former director
of the Creative Writing Program from 1991-1996, he currently teaches
both poetry and fiction at the University of Houston, where he was
named the John and Rebecca Moore Scholar in 1998.


What people are saying about this book

On Robert Phillips's first collections:
 
"Humane . . . moving . . . dramatic . . ."—Joyce Carol Oates

"What I admire about these stories is the clarity and simplicity of
the narrative—here they are certainly narratives above all
else—the voice of the storyteller."—William Goyen

"Readers of Robert Phillips's poetry will delight to find his always
lively perceptions in the stories of News About People You Know.
They are told with verve and wit, also shadowed by awareness of
life's mysterious ways. Here light and dark live together, and we
find life in our present time revealed."—Elizabeth Spencer