Born in Indianola, Mississippi,
Steve Yarbrough is the author of novels
Safe from the Neighbors,
The End of California,
Prisoners of War,
The Oxygen Man, and
Visible Spirits, and three
collections of stories. A PEN/Faulkner finalist, he has received the Mississippi Authors Award, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award, and an award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. He now teaches at Emerson College and lives with his wife in Stoneham, Massachusetts.
Yarbrough's new novel is
The Realm of Last Chances.
Earlier this month I asked the author about what he was reading. Yarbrough's reply:
Right now, I'm on something of a Hungarian fiction binge. Presently I am reading Peter Nadas's ambitious and challenging Parallel Stories. This comes on the heels of a Gyula Krudy collection from 
NYRB titled The Adventures of Sindbad. I have another Krudy novel on-deck, Sunflower, again from NYRB. The impetus for all of this is that some years ago, I became infatuated, like one of the characters in my own new novel The Realm of Last Chances, with the work of the Hungarian novelist Sandor Marai (Embers). Earlier this summer, I read a memoir by Marai, and started jotting down the names of the writers he mentioned, and I was pleased to discover that a great many of them are in print here, thanks mostly to NYRB. Many national literatures tend to be most impressive in a particular genre; in Poland, it's poetry, but in Hungary it's definitely the novel. Imre Kertesz and Gyorgy Konrad are two others I've long admired.
Visit
Steve Yarbrough's website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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