Purple Flat Top: In Pursuit of a Place

University of Washington Press, September 2011

“In Jack Nisbet, an unsung corner of the West has found its troubadour. His north-of-Spokane tales of disgusted dairymen and hopeful miners, of white ravens and dancing grouse, ring with the spirit of the legend of the Sky People– “the time when men and animals lived together as equals.”
 
– Ivan Doig

“Purple Flat Top is everything a portrait of a place should be: intimately local yet completely universal, rich in the texture of people and other species, and spit-true…I doubt if a dozen living writers have portrayed slices of the Northwest with the grace, verve, and loving presence of Purple Flat Top.”
 
– Robert Michael Pyle

“[Purple Flat Top] is the most pleasurable reading I’ve come across in a long, long time. The humor is wonderful, but so accumulative and subtle that one almost constantly feels the urge to burst out laughing without quite knowing why.”
 
– Patrick F. McManus