Poets & Writers Theater

“The ‘need’ is many things in the book...a child’s need for milk and then also the mother’s need for the child to relieve her of the milk and the mother’s need for her children, that love going two directions.” On BRIC TV’s 112BK, Helen Phillips talks about her second novel, The Need (Simon & Schuster, 2019), different reactions to the book, her own experiences as a mother, and some of the inspiration for its themes. For more Phillips, read her answers to Ten Questions about her novel.

In this debut novel by Helen Phillips, a young wife's new job, which consists of entering numbers into something only known as the Database, is linked to a larger mystery.The Beautiful Bureaucrat is forthcoming from Henry Holt in August.

In this Electric Literature video, Adam Thompson animates a single, serpentine but elegant sentence describing a bleak vision of the future imagined by Helen Phillips in “The Knowers.” Music by Nathan Thompson.

This trailer for Helen Phillips's debut "novel in the form of linked fables," And Yet They Were Happy, published this month by Leapfrog Press, is animated by the author's husband, Adam Thompson, and features music by his brother, Nathan. Vanity Fair described Phillips as a "surreal miniaturist," and critic Michael Dirda praised her book as "a gallery of marvels."