Donald Harington was a significant American author whose works often take place in the fictional town of Stay More in the Ozark Mountains, inspired by his childhood. Despite losing most of his hearing at a young age, he masterfully captured and portrayed the unique language and spirit of the Ozark dwellers. Though acclaimed by many as one of America's greatest contemporary writers, his novels remain remarkably undiscovered by the wider public. Critics celebrate his uniquely original and distinctive body of work, calling it an undiscovered continent within American letters.
Corrupt politicians of Stay More, Arkansas, frame Nail Chism for rape and sentence him to death in 1914, while Viridis Monday, an artist trained in Paris, draws trial sketches and decides that Chism is not guilty.
This work brilliantly fuses travel narrative with history and cultural studies--yet reads like a novel. It's also a love story that is in no way fictional. A fan letter to the author from a woman named Kim starts a correspondence which details research she's conducting in one-horse towns throughout Arkansas. In the years of rural decline many of these towns dwindled to church, post office, general store, gas station, and a few rundown houses--but every house has a porch, every porch a rocker, and every rocker an old man or woman with a story. Kim and Don agree to collaborate on a book--this one--creating a unique and enchanting work about towns that will never again be their old selves and towns that never fulfilled the brave dreams of their founders. And at the end of the adventure the author and Kim meet, having learned something of expectation and hope--and love. With photos and maps.
Clifford Stone--quixotic curator of arcane Americana at a Boston antiques foundation and cataloguer of our "Vanished American Past"--forsakes Boston and his icy wife to return to his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, and a life that is both instantly familiar and disturbingly strange. Cliff's journey home begins as a recovery mission, but it becomes a desperate search for, confrontation with, immersion in, and emergence from his lost past. In a series of libidinous, murderous, hilarious and anxious adventures, Cliff renews old friendships--including one with a girl he thought he'd forgotten--and makes some new enemies. The Cherry Pit is a flamboyant, lascivious, comic novel about restoration and renewal--and, like all proper comic novels, a serious book.
For decades, Donald Harington has delighted readers with ribald, colorful adventures from Stay More, Arkansas, an imaginary Ozark enclave where shrewd and sexy hill folk mingle with reclusive millionaires rich from Wal-Mart stock, indigenous Indians, and legendary leftovers from the town's occasionally magical and completely mythical past. Now, with Thirteen Albatrosses, Harington returns to Stay More to document the uproarious attempt of native son Vernon Ingledew to earn the governorship of his great, if sometimes much-maligned, state. But, to his own shock, Ingledew-a handsome but less than telegenic ham magnate and self-educated polymath-is hampered by what his opponents refer to as his "Thirteen Albatrosses." Among them: he is an atheist; he never attended college; he lives in sin with his first cousin, Jelena; he displays a hysterically cryptic vocabulary. Not to mention the fact that he also supports "extirpating"-that is, getting rid of-hospitals, schools, prisons, tobacco, and handguns.
Continues the story of the little town of Stay More, hidden away in the hills of the Ozarks, and reveals for the first time the mysteries of Latha Bourne, who is set apart from her fellow Stay Morons by her beauty, wit, and intense, unfulfilled sexuality
Every time Hoppy enters a town in his truck, he is greeted with delight and anticipation, showered with warmth, offered meals, and more often than not, pretty girls trying to catch more than just his eye. It's not that Hoppy is so special; it's the pitcher shows that he brings with him, the shoot-'em-ups and giddyappers that all the Ozark folk adore that have them lining up to welcome him. Hoppy's predictable routine and his struggles with his own self-loathing are challenged when a teenager succeeds in stowing away in his truck and proves to be a lot more than he seems. Together they contend with a wily traveling preacher who dogs their heels, trying to steal away their audience with his message of salvation. This peddler of the Gospel is just as bent on making money as the peddler of the motion pitcher, and in his cunning he steals all of Hoppy's cowboy pitchers. The pitcher shower has no choice but to buy the only available pitcher he can find, a strange pitcher called A Midsummer Night's Dream, and hope that it will prove popular with audiences who expect horses and Hopalong Cassidy.
With is the sensual, suspenseful and irresistible tale of Robin Kerr, a young girl abducted from her family and brought to a remote Ozark mountaintop, where she is left to fend for herself. Over the course of a decade, Robin grows up without human relationship, but with the company of animals and an inhabit, the half-living ghost of a young boy. In this magical novel in the Stay More series, Harington gives us one of the most original survival, coming-of-age, and love stories ever told.
The raucous and poignant story of Doc Swain describes how he becomes a physician without attending medical school, his ability to heal patients with the "dream cure," his pursuit by a student and a music teacher from the high school at which he teaches, and the heartbreaking choices he must make.
During World War II, real news is a rare commodity in the hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas. But twelve-year-old Dawny - inspired by his hero Ernie Pyle - finds enough local color to keep the townsfolk reading his weekly newspaper, The Stay Morning Star. Dawny reports on the war between the Allies and the Axis, two roving bands of boys and girls fighting with sticks and spears, and competing in scrap drives and verbal jousts. But the tenor of these games changes as developments bring the world's war closer to home: the crackle of the town's first radio delivers frightening news from the outside world to the isolated village, and a native son dies on Iwo Jima. For the first time ever, an airplane darkens the skies over Stay More, and soldiers occupy the remote hills in training for an invasion of Japan. As the ways of outsiders creep into the small town's routines, the texture of rural life is irrevocably changed.
Latha Bourne, the attractive postmistress of Stay More — a small town in the Arkansas Ozarks — didn't expect to see Every Dill again. More than ten years before, he had raped her, robbed the bank, and vanished - leaving her pregnant. Now Every has the nerve to reappear. An erotic yet wonderfully innocent tale of loss and of finding.