News About People You Know

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.