Safe from the Neighbors is a novel of unusual richness and depth, one that's as wise about the small shocks within a marriage as it is about the troubled history of Mississippi. Steve Yarbrough is a formidably talented novelist, shuttling between the past and present with a grace that feels effortless.

If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.

I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It's pretty wild. I hadn't heard of it until I was in college.

I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.

It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.

Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."