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WORK TITLE: Impossible Owls
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1976
WEBSITE:
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2018000279
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2018000279
HEADING: Phillips, Brian, 1976-
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008 180103n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2018000279
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC
046 __ |f 1976-02-29 |2 edtf
053 _0 |a PS3616.H4534
100 1_ |a Phillips, Brian, |d 1976-
670 __ |a Impossible owls, [2018] |b ECIP t.p. (Brian Phillips) datasheet ̣̣̣̣̣̣̣̣̣̣̣̣̣(b. 2/29/1976; online long-form journalist)
PERSONAL
Born 1976.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked formerly as a staff writer for Grantland and a senior writer for MTV News.
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous periodicals, including New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, and Slate; contributor to Best American Sports Writing and Best American Magazine Writing.
SIDELIGHTS
Brian Phillips is a Pennslyvania-based writer. He is a former staff writer for Grantland and a former senior writer for MTV News. His work has appeared in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Magazine Writing and he has contributed to New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, and Slate. Phillips lives in central Pennsylvania. Impossible Owls, a collection of essays, is his first book.
In Impossible Owls, Phillips draws from his experiences as a journalist and writer for popular culture news outlets. The essays range from explorations of kitschy sci-fic locales to peculiar and remote subcultures, such as the world of tiger tourism in India. His journalism background is clear in many of the essays, such as in “Once and Future Queen,” a speculative piece. In it, Phillips references his own experiences researching, observing, and writing about the royal family, developing an almost obsessive knowledge of the Queen and her sons. In the essay, he goes a step further, creating an imagined narration of the conversations and opinions of the Queen and King.
Phillips’ essays take the reader around the world. In “Out in the Great Alone,” Phillips travels to Alaska, wholly unprepared, to follow the famous Iditarod trail from a small plane. While there, he is touched by the human connection present in such a desolate, often sad, place. In Area 51 in Roswell, New Mexico, a location infamous for alien encounters, Phillips reflects on the phenomena of supposed UFO-encounter victims’ PTSD symptoms. He interjects this reflection with side notes about the Spotify playlist he listens to as he drives along historic route 66. In “But Not Like Your Typical Love Story,” Phillips visits his hometown of Ponca City, Oklahoma. He writes about a family tragedy and details an oil fortune scandal involving a highly inappropriate marriage. Stylistically, the essays are diverse and energetic. Phillips writes free-form anecdotes alongside lengthy passages and condensed histories of peoples and places. He often sidesteps the telltale signs of a memoir, instead using a voice that is slightly removed from his experience, and is often humorous.
Donna Seaman in Booklist described the essay collection as “built on rich veins of research and further enlivened with crisply recounted conversations and convivially self-deprecating glimpses into his state of mind.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described Impossible Owls as “smooth and smart relief for the screen-weary,” while a contributor to Publishers Weekly noted, “Phillips brings together entertaining, eclectic, and often insightful essays.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 2018, Donna Seaman, review of Impossible Owls, p. 17.
Kirkus Reviews July 1, 2018, review of Impossible Owls.
Publishers Weekly, May 7, 2018, review of Impossible Owls, p. 55.
Brian Phillips
Brianphillips preview CREDIT:
HTTP://WWW.RUNOFPLAY.COM/ @BRIANPHILLIPS
Brian Phillips is a former staff writer for Grantland and a former senior writer for MTV News. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Slate, among other publications, and his work has appeared in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Magazine Writing. He lives in central Pennsylvania. Impossible Owls is his first book.
BECOME A REDDITOR
57
Posted byu/brian_phillips
AMA Author10 days ago
ama 1pmI am Brian Phillips, author of Impossible Owls: Essays, and former Grantland and MTV News writer. AMA!
Hi. I'm Brian Phillips. You may know me from such recently published essay collections as Impossible Owls. I'm also a former writer for many of the Internet's most destroyed websites, including Grantland and MTV News. (Reddit may get shut down as a result of my being here -- sorry. It's a curse.)
My new book gathers eight essays that roam all over the world, from India, where I went to write about man-eating tigers, to Alaska, where I followed the Iditarod sled-dog race from the back of a small plane. I profiled a great Russian animator who's spent 37 years trying to finish his masterwork. I took a lot of Vicodin and went to see Wrath of the Titans. AMA! (Maybe not about the plot of Wrath of the Titans).
Proof that I'm me: https://i.redd.it/pixly0iw3uq11.jpg
EDIT: Ok, everyone, I am reaching critical levels of bleariness here in the old hotel lobby, so I'm going to call it an AMA and see if I can check into my room. Thanks for all these great questions--I'm sorry I wasn't able to get to all of them. And thanks for your support for Impossible Owls. It means the world. I'll see you around on......the Internet.
Print Marked Items
Phillips, Brian: IMPOSSIBLE OWLS
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Phillips, Brian IMPOSSIBLE OWLS Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $15.00 10, 2 ISBN: 978-
0-374-17533-7
Long-form narratives both diverting and engaging.
In his debut collection, former Grantland and MTV News writer Phillips follows the familiar trajectory of
the participatory journalist chasing down new angles on quirky subjects and subcultures--space invaders,
sumo wrestlers, the Iditarod, tiger tourism in India--but his work stands out for its refreshing lack of
memoir. On the whole, the author's eclectic travelogues and essays don't end up being journeys back to the
author himself, though his keen sensitivities color each scene, and he rarely hides his feelings about the
figures he meets. Phillips has fashioned a calling for himself as an American flaneur, casting out into postcolonial
frontiers and marveling at the oddities he encounters from the comfortable distance of unsupervised
creative prose. His style blends free-form anecdotes with capsule histories and novellike passages that don't
stop to sort out fact from perception or conjectures. Of his days among remote Alaskans, he writes, "it was
such a warm place. I mean, fine, we're all jaded here, but you could feel it: this fragile human warmth
surrounded by almost unmanageable sadness." Topics begin in earnest but drop away to follow alternate
lines of inquiry. For example, a nerd's-eye view of UFO enthusiasm surrounding Area 51 leads to reveries
on the PTSD of otherwise sane people who claim alien abduction, the derelict remains of Route 66, the
genocide of Native Americans, and the mysteries of time as expressed in landscape. His biographical
sketches of the British royal family speculate on their private conversations ("My dear, these people are
beneath us," he imagines Prince Philip whispering to the queen), and he narrates the life of gifted Russian
animator Yuri Norstein in the present-tense omniscience of a film script. Such stylistic pyrotechnics impress
less, however, than the flecks of genuine insight the author dredges up from his experiences as well as the
sense of a full human mind at large in the world that so many of his recollections approximate.
Smooth and smart relief for the screen-weary.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Phillips, Brian: IMPOSSIBLE OWLS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A544637864/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d8676113.
Accessed 19 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A544637864
Impossible Owls
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
115.2 (Sept. 15, 2018): p17.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Impossible Owls.
By Brian Phillips.
Oct. 2018.352p. Farrar, paper, $15 (9780374175337). 814.6.
When Phillips, a jazzy John McPhee, ventures out into the world in pursuit of understanding of a place,
mystery, vocation, or obsession, he is attention incarnate. The resulting prismatic descriptions power his
vibrant, multidimensional essays, which are built on rich veins of research and further enlivened with
crisply recounted conversations and convivially self-deprecating glimpses into his state of mind. Giddily
unprepared, Phillips travels to Alaska to follow the Iditarod from a small plane. Although he feels
overwhelmed in Tokyo, where his parents were married while his father was stationed there, he crafts an
astute, many-faceted chronicle anchored to sumo wrestling and the writer Yukio Mishima's "spectacular
suicide" in 1970. Phillips visits kitschy Roswell, New Mexico, and enigmatic Area 51, musing over the
puzzles of reported UFO experiences while sharing his Spotify playlist as he drives on Route 66. He
watches for tigers in India, observes the queen in London, and tells intricately affecting tales of his
Oklahoma hometown, including a family tragedy and a scandal involving an oil fortune and a wildly
inappropriate marriage. And, yes, there are owls.--Donna Seaman
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Impossible Owls." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2018, p. 17. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A556571613/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=081ebb3b.
Accessed 19 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A556571613
Impossible Owls: Essays
Publishers Weekly.
265.19 (May 7, 2018): p55+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Impossible Owls: Essays
Brian Phillips. FSG Originals, $15 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-0-374-17533-7
Former Grantland staff writer Phillips brings together entertaining, eclectic, and often insightful essays for a
collection with room for considerations of both the datedness of sci-fi television and the ethical ambiguity of
ecotourism. He often approaches topics from a pleasingly oblique angle, as when describing Queen
Elizabeth II in "Once and Future Queen" through the people who serve and surround her, and the items she's
known to carry in her handbag, including a "five-pound note, crisply folded, for the church collection plate.
Sometimes ten pounds; never more." He also likes to play a central role in his own essays, an effective
strategy for personal pieces, such as one about his hometown of Ponca City, Okla., "But Not Like Your
Typical Love Story," but distracting in farther-flung pieces, such as one on the Iditarod, "Out in the Great
Alone." Despite this misstep, Phillips's narrative voice is consistently appealing, and often laugh-out-loud
funny ("The backyard was a jungle. I don't mean 'We'll spend a weekend weeding and then plant some
hydrangeas.' I mean there were creatures out there that had lairs"). At their best, Phillips's essays leave
readers with newfound appreciation for subjects they may not have considered before, including sumo
wrestling and Russia's greatest living animator. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Impossible Owls: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p. 55+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858703/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0981f194.
Accessed 19 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538858703