Visible Spirits - Rilegato

"Independent booksellers are really rooting for this lyrical novel, about a small Mississippi town during Reconstruction. They are hoping to win over the same readers who helped make the small novel Plainsong a big hit a few years ago."
–Editor's Picks, Wall Street Journal

"Absorbing and instructive . . . Visible Spirits brilliantly brings to life the beginnings of the bleak turn in Southern history that C. Vann Woodward once identified as "the strange career of Jim Crow."
–Christopher Tilghman, Washington Post Book World

"A compelling look at moral courage, full of passion . . . The place, people, events and emotions are so authentic in Steve Yarbrough's second novel, it's hard to believe the story is fiction."
–J. Ford Huffman, USA Today

"Invites comparison with Faulkner's greatest novels, Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels, even To Kill a Mockingbird . . .Yarbrough's novel holds up fine against its elder cousins."
–Diane Roberts, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Visible Spirits is a strong, moving novel that captures the texture of daily life in the Old South, and the virulence and complexity of racial prejudice . . . Yarbrough writes with insight, compassion and humor, so a realistic tale becomes refreshing and vibrant.”
—Ha Jin

“Steve Yarbrough is a confident and elegant prose stylist and a storyteller who knows how empty spaces can resonate with power and meaning. It is the unspoken, the invisible and the unacknowledged that give this novel its dramatic complexity, its profound force and depth of feeling. It is the interstices between the lines that evoke not only historical grief but the grief of our own time.”
—David Guterson

“In clean elastic prose, Steve Yarbrough has fashioned a rich dark fable out of his Mississippi material—a fable whose moral applies as much today as it would have in the yesterday it’s written about.”
—Kent Haruf

“Steve Yarbrough’s Visible Spirits is fiercely remembered in the blood of every Deltacrat. A powerful novel that lays the guilt down freshly in a story that’s irresistible and, finally, howling to be told. True Art.” —Barry Hannah

Steve Yarbrough is the author of three collections of stories and a novel, The Oxygen Man, which received the Mississippi Authors’ Award, the California Book Award and a third from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. A native of the Delta town of Indianola, he now lives in Fresno, California.