Her next collection, "Black Tickets", published by Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence in 1979 when she was 26, was her first book of stories and brought her national attention as a talented and important writer. "Black Tickets" contained three types of stories: one page fictions, inner soliloquies, and family dramas. These stories focused on her characters' loneliness, alienation, and unsuccessful searches for happiness. "Black Tickets" is mentioned in the 2006 lectures for the Modern Scholar series installment "From Here to Infinity", by Professor Michael D. C. Drout, who refers to her style—which he asserts was a direct influence on William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel "Neuromancer"—as a "headlong rush of story and description". Called "the unmistakable work of early genius" by Tillie Olsen, Black Tickets was praised by Raymond Carver: “These stories of America’s disenfranchised – men and women light-years away from the American Dream – are quite unlike any in our literature ... this book is a crooked beauty.” Black Tickets was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.