the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Phillips followed with a (1984) first novel, Machine Dreams, “a remarkable novelistic debut and an enduring literary achievement.” (The New York Times),'|Machine Dreams]]” is a chronicle of the Hampson family from World War II to the Vietnam War. A National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist in Fiction, was one of 12 Best Books of the Year cited by the New York Times. It made several Bestseller lists and was optioned as a film by actor Jessica Lange, who wrote the screenplay. Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer said of Machine Dreams: “Reaches one’s deepest emotions. No number of books read or films seen can deaden one to the intimate act of art by which this wonderful young writer has penetrated the definitive experience of her generation.” Fast Lanes, a 1988 collection of ten stories, all first-person narratives, was praised as work by a writer “in love with the American language.” Novels Machine Dreams (1984) Shelter (1994) MotherKind (2000) Lark & Termite (2008) Quiet Dell (2013) In 1994, Phillips published her second novel, Shelter, a portrait of the loss of innocence at a West Virginia girls' camp in the summer of 1963. Called “a rich, vivid novel of moral and psychological complexity destined to stand alongside works by Faulkner and other Southern masters” (Vanity Fair) and “a defiant, frighteningly beautiful novel as disturbing as its setting, Shelter feels like Phillips’ bid for immortality” (Harpers Bazaar), Shelter was awarded an Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Phillips' next novel was MotherKind (2000), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, a story of intergenerational love and struggles within a family facing many changes. It is praised as one of the best novels about mothers and infants and the mother/daughter bond. Lark and Termite, her fourth novel, was published by Knopf in 2009 to extremely positive reviews and was selected as one of five finalists for the National Book Award in fiction. Lark and Termite was also a Finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle in Fiction; Lark et Termite (French translation by Marc Amfreville) was a Finalist for the Prix de Medici Etrangers (Paris). Quiet Dell, Phillips’ fifth novel, based on the true story of the 1931 murders of Chicago widow Asta Eicher and her three children in the hamlet of Quiet Dell, WV, is a fictional portrayal