Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show: Bookmarked

by Steve Yarbrough

Overview

Set in a small, dusty Texas town, The Last Picture Show is one of Larry McMurtry's most memorable novels, and the basis for the enormously popular movie of the same name. In this volume in Ig's acclaimed Bookmarked series, award-winning author Steve Yarbrough shares with us the importance of this seminal novel on his life and work.

Steve Yarbrough is the author of nine novels, including The Realm of Last Chances (2013) and Safe from the Neighbors (2010), both published by Knopf. His 2006 novel, The End of California, (Knopf) was a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction. His 2004 novel, Prisoners of War, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his 1999 novel, The Oxygen Man, won the California Book Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the Mississippi Authors Award. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. In 2010, he won the Richard Wright Award.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632460509
Publisher:	Ig Publishing
Publication date:	09/12/2017
Series:	Bookmarked Series , #7
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	318 KB

About the Author

Steve Yarbrough is the author of nine books. His latest novel The Realm of Last Chances was published by Knopf in 2013. His previous novel, Safe from the Neighbors (Knopf), appeared in 2010. His 2006 novel The End of California (Knopf) was a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction. His novel Prisoners of War (Knopf, 2004) was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his 1999 novel The Oxygen Man won the California Book Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the Mississippi Authors Award. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. In 2010, he won the Richard Wright Award.

Editorial Reviews

06/26/2017
For this entry in the Bookmarked series, in which writers articulate how a particular book has influenced them, novelist Yarbrough (The Realm of Last Chances) discusses McMurtry’s classic tale of small-town Texas life. Yarbrough details his own small-town Mississippi upbringing and skillfully conveys its complex matrix of race and class, the tug-of-war between religion and sexual desire, and the way in which his father’s unrealized dreams colored much of his own life. Yarbrough, like Picture Show’s protagonist Sonny Crawford, was a football star who lost his footing as soon as he graduated. Also like McMurtry’s protagonist, he embarked on an affair with an older, married woman, an experience Yarbrough recounts unflinchingly. He does not ignore Peter Bogdanovich’s successful film adaptation, but his focus remains on how McMurtry’s novel, with its potent mix of sex, religion, and class, reflects his own upbringing. His vivid work leaves no doubt about the impact that reading can have on a person’s life. As Yarbrough concludes, about first reading McMurtry, “ would convince me that lives like mine, and those of the people I saw around me in a place I hated at least as much as I loved it, were worth an infinite number of stories.” (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly