Veneer $40.00
Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press (1998)
Paperback original.
Acclaimed short story writer Steve Yarbrough, whose works have been included in the Pushcart Prize anthology and The Best American Mystery Stories 1998, once again demonstrates his gift for vividly rendered characters and evocative themes in his latest collection of fiction. Veneer presents a variety of characters from cultural backgrounds and settings that range from California to Eastern Europe. Yarbrough’s sensitive portrayals of loss and longing axe individual and unsettling; a disaffected college football coach, a movie star with a “substance problem”, and a small-town girl coming to grips with the murder of her mother are just a few examples of the turbulent lives he portrays. In every instance, each character is “constantly searching for some way to bridge the gap, so small and yet so vast, between a right move and a wrong one”. A poignant theme running through this collection is the conflict between appearance and reality. Yarbrough presents the reader with deep narrative layers, juxtaposing the gritty present with nostalgic recollections of an idealized past or hopeful projections into a rosy future. “Veneer”, the title piece, beautifully reveals the depth of this conflict. On the surface, the narrator, a married man whose family is away on vacation, enjoys a dinner with a woman who has been a longtime friend. Beneath that “veneer”, however, lies a more complex, perhaps troubling, relationship between the two friends, a relationship only partially obscured by the comic recounting of a childhood Independence Day. Yarbrough is at his best when he offers us brief glimpses into his characters’ minds and imaginations, brilliantly exposing subtle vulnerabilities as cracks inthe veneer. “Bohemia” follows the travels of two young lovers as they explore Europe. The woman fears that her lover will abandon her, and when she wakes to find him gone one evening, she believes her fear is confirmed. Yet his return does not alleviate her insecurity. The reality of her lover’s presence and her continued anxiety emphasize the many layers that constitute the woman’s world. Diverse in locale, character, and content, the stories in Veneer present rare views into the riffs between husband and wife, parent and child, one sibling and another. Crafting these compelling, deceptively simple stories is a writer whose “true subject is the human heart”.
Delta Deep Down $40.00
Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (2008)
Photographs that capture the land, people, and ever-present spirits of the Mississippi Delta
Family Men $200.00
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Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press (1990)
In Yarbroughs first collection of stories Yarbrough effortlessly evokes the special qualities of small-town southern life as he examines–with subtle humor, keen insight, and unfailing sympathy–the relationships between ordinary men and women. Yarbrough’s characters, though frequently baffled by life, achieve a kind of wisdom, if not happiness, through the bonds they develop.
Mississippi History $50.00
Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press (1994)
Paperback original.
For many characters in this collection of stories, set in the Mississippi Delta, the past is more immediate than the present. The author sets out on a detailed exploration of the trials and desires of the small farming community of Indianola.
Prisoners of War $50.00
New York: Knopf (2006)
Set in a Mississippi farming town in 1943, “Prisoners of War” is the story of Marty Stark, returned mysteriously from the front and reassigned to guard men he had been trained to kill–German soldiers whose fighting days are over.
Prisoners of War $16.95
New York, NY: Vintage. (2005)
It is 1943, and the war has come home to Loring, Mississippi. As German POWs labor in the cotton fields, the local draft board sends boys into uniform, and families receive flags and condolences. But for Dan Timms, just shy of 18, the war is his ticket out of town and away from the ghosts that haunt him. As he peddles goods from a rolling store for his profiteer uncle, Dan tries to understand his friend L.C., a young man who, on account of his skin, feels like a prisoner himself. But one day, Dan spots Marty Stark who has just returned from Italy, mysteriously reassigned to guard the POWs he was once trained to kill. As Dan soon learns, Marty’s war is far from over and threatens to erupt again.
The End of California $13.95
New York, NY: Random House (2007)
From critically acclaimed author Steve Yarbrough comes this riveting, beautifully nuanced, new novel of life in a small town.
After twenty-five years away and an illicit scandal in California, Dr. Pete Barrington is returning home to Loring, Mississippi, where football rules and religious piety mingles uncomfortably with darker human impulses. Though Barrington sets up a small practice and finds solace in an old friend, his wife, Angela, and daughter, Toni, are having trouble adjusting. Also, Barrington’s homecoming has awakened difficult memories for Alan DePoyster, a former high school classmate and now a pillar of the community, who blames Barrington for tearing apart his family. When DePoyster’s son and Barrington’s daughter begin a fledgling relationship, the children are forced to pay for their parents’ sins, and things take a disastrous, even shocking turn.
The Oxygen Man $100.00
Denver, CO: MacMurray & Beck (1999)
Brother and sister Ned and Daze Rose were defined as outcasts in the 1970s when they were scholarship students at a posh school. Now Ned works for a good-ole boy from high school, checking oxygen levels in fish farm ponds, while Daze. obsessed with her mother’s loose reputation, retreats into a cocoon of silence.
Visible Spirits $65.00
New York, NY: Knopf (2001)
A heart-stopping story, written with grace and lucidity, located at the dead center of Southern mythology and our most intransigent national trauma. The year is 1902, and the place is a small community deep in the Mississippi Delta, where black and white alike struggle to coexist as the era of Reconstruction gives way to Jim Crow. Into this tense atmosphere rides Tandy Payne — brother to Loring’s well-liked mayor, and a dissolute gambler looking to reclaim the family estate and escape his many enemies. The presence of a black postmistress in town soon awakens his darkest instincts, and the ensuing clash with his principled brother results in a harrowing confrontation. Fueled by a haunting and bloody history, their familial dispute quickly spreads through the countryside, testing those who long for an antebellum past, and all those who must face down deep hatreds in order to claim their future.
Visible Spirits $13.00
New York: Random House (2002)
A heart-stopping story, written with grace and lucidity, located at the dead center of Southern mythology and an intransigent national trauma. In a small community deep in the Mississippi Delta, black and white alike struggle to coexist as the era of Reconstruction gives way to Jim Crow.
The Realm of Last Chances $25.95
New York, NY: Knopf (2013)
In a captivating departure from the Deep South setting of his previous fiction, Steve Yarbrough now gives us a richly nuanced portrait of a marriage being reinvented in a small town in the Northeast, in his most surprising and compelling novel yet.
When Kristin Stevens loses her job in California’s higher-education system, she and her husband, Cal, relocate to Massachusetts. Kristin takes a position at a smaller, less prestigious university and promptly becomes entangled in its delicate, overheated politics. Cal, whose musical talent is nothing more than a consuming avocation, spends his days alone, fixing up their new home. And as they settle into their early fifties, the two seem to exist in separate spheres entirely.
At the same time, their younger neighbor Matt Drinnan watches as his ex-wife takes up with another man in town, with only himself to blame. Each facing a different sense of isolation, he and Kristin gravitate toward each other, at first in hopes of a platonic confidant but then, inevitably, as something more.
The Realm of Last Chances provides us with a subtle, moving exploration of relationships, loneliness, and our convoluted attempts to reach out to one another.
Visible Spirits $35.00
New York, NY: Knopf (2001)
A heart-stopping story, written with grace and lucidity, located at the dead center of Southern mythology and our most intransigent national trauma. The year is 1902, and the place is a small community deep in the Mississippi Delta, where black and white alike struggle to coexist as the era of Reconstruction gives way to Jim Crow. Into this tense atmosphere rides Tandy Payne — brother to Loring’s well-liked mayor, and a dissolute gambler looking to reclaim the family estate and escape his many enemies. The presence of a black postmistress in town soon awakens his darkest instincts, and the ensuing clash with his principled brother results in a harrowing confrontation. Fueled by a haunting and bloody history, their familial dispute quickly spreads through the countryside, testing those who long for an antebellum past, and all those who must face down deep hatreds in order to claim their future.
The Oxygen Man $75.00
Denver, CO: MacMurray & Beck (1999)
A powerful and gritty first novel about revenge, reconciliation, and redemption in the Mississippi Delta.
The End of California $60.00
New York, NY: Knopf (2006)
Fine in dust jacket.
A PEN/Faulkner finalist for “Prisoners of War,” Steve Yarbrough returns to the Mississippi Delta–seen through the historical lens of World War II in that novel, and of Jim Crow in his previous, “Visible Spirits”–but now in the blinding light of contemporary life.
Loring is the sort of town children dream of leaving and most adults return to only in the absence of better options. But after twenty-five years Pete Barrington–having escaped to California on a football scholarship and then established himself as a doctor, only to be brought low by scandal–has come home. Here he finds solace with his closest old friend, opens a new practice, and daily runs into memories he’d rather forget, even as his aggravated wife and unsettled daughter contend with this wholly alien society.
Meanwhile, Alan DePoyster has come to revel in his family life and his position in the church and community–the sort of idyll snatched away from him in childhood and won back only with patience and faith. Yet he now feels old grudges against the prodigal Barrington eroding his sense of accomplishment; and as their lives inevitably become intertwined, his rage against the forces chiseling away at his values and beliefs soon threatens to destroy everything he cherishes.
“The End of California” is a vivid, even shocking, portrait of small-town life, where people turn to booze, gossip, and feckless sex in their struggles with provincial claustrophobia, where fates often hang in the balance of personal history, and where the sins of the fathers and mothers are visited most acutely on their sons and daughters. This is the most expansive, generous, and moving novel thus far from “a confident and elegantprose stylist,” as David Guterson has described him, “a storyteller who knows how empty spaces can resonate with power and meaning.”
Safe from the Neighbors $25.95
New York, NY: Knopf (2010)
When a long-lost friend suddenly returns to Luke May’s hometown of Loring, Mississippi, where years ago her family had been consumed by an act of spectacular violence, Luke begins to realize that his connection with her runs deeper than he ever imagined.