By Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
Narrated By Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
Release Date: 07-12-21

SUMMARY

Hailed by Lauren Groff as “fully committed to the truth no matter how dark or difficult or complicated it may be,” and written with “incantatory crispness,” Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain. Here, time and memory circle above Phillips’ characters like vultures and angels, as they navigate the only landscape they’ve ever known. Corn reaches for rain, deer run blindly, and no matter how hungry or hurt, some forgotten hymn is always remembered. “The literary love child of Carson McCullers and John the Baptist, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ imagination is profoundly original and private," writes Rebecca Lee. Sleepovers marks the debut of a fearless new voice in fiction.

Sleepovers is the winner of the 2019 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, selected by Lauren Groff.

SLEEPOVERS

PRAISE

"The lives of Phillips’s characters transform with startling quickness, and a kind of presumed violence is omnipresent—yet everyone here is still trying to do their best. The music of her literary predecessors (Larry Brown, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor) is present in Phillips’s sentences, but what’s most remarkable about her writing is its generosity. Even when they’re f***ing up or making bad decisions or metabolizing deep grief, these characters are full and rich and gloriously recognizable." —The New Yorker

"Phillips has an uncanny skill for seeing and capturing the details that give a moment its texture and reflect an invisible atmosphere of feeling. In her hands, these images, which before had not been visible—or had been seen so much that they were no longer noticed—are given new life. Phillips's haunting, relentless attention to detail asks readers to see such moments and the people they enchant with renewed vigor, empathy and compassion." —Shelf Awareness

"This collection stands out in the field of current Southern fiction." —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"A deeply human, unforgettable debut." —Booklist

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is from rural Woodland, North Carolina. She's a graduate of Meredith College and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her stories have appeared in The Oxford American, The Paris Review and others. Sleepovers is her first book.

2021 The Talking Book