Farther Along
(coming May 2008)

He wants to get away from it all. Despite a satisfying career as chief curator of a museum devoted to the vanished American past, he finds he himself wants to vanish. So with the help of a book on the life and culture of a vanished tribe of Indians known as Bluff-dwellers, he takes up residence in the wilderness of the Ozark mountains, with only a dog for company and only an atlatl - a primitive spear thrower - to provide him with his supper. His few amusements are the playing of tunes on a hair-comb-and-tissue and writing what he intends to be an indictment of modern civilization in his journals. He makes the acquaintance of a young moonshiner who keeps him supplied abundantly with corn liquor. But after six years of this life he realizes that what he is trying to get away from is himself.

Two women try to save him from drinking himself to death: an elderly widow who was once the postmistress of the abandoned town down in the valley, and a lovely but mysterious redhead who may or may not be the incarnation of the mistress of the fabled man who had founded the town ages ago.

The title of this latest gem comes from a folk hymn commonly sung at funerals, "Farther along we'll know all about it, farther along we'll understand why." With the gentle humor and earthy passion that characterize all of his novels, Donald Harington attempts to offer some knowing and some understanding, farther along.
 

The Pitcher Shower
 

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's Night Dream, and hope that it will prove popular with audiences who expect horses and Hopalong Cassidy.
Join Hoppy on his picaresque adventures as he brings the magic of Shakespeare and the magic of the Ozarks together, and struggles with the misery of love, both the giving and receiving...

With

Impossible to categorize, With is a sensual, irresistible tale, full of unexpected twists and turns. What starts out as a suspenseful recounting of child abduction evolves into the story of eight-year-old Robin Kerr growing up in the wilds of the Ozarks, left to fend for herself on a remote, inaccessible mountain-top. Without ‘human’ company for a decade, forced to live off the land, Robin is never alone; her animal companions grow more numerous year by year, and the ‘live ghost’ of a young boy who once lived on the mountain is her constant companion. With a dog, a young girl and a ghost as the main viewpoint characters in this remarkable novel, Donald Harington, creator of the mythic and magical Ozark town of Stay More, has given us a fascinating and triumphant story of survival—and the most original love story ever told.

The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (A Novel)

Jacob and Noah Ingledew trudge 600 miles from their native Tennessee to found Stay More, a small town nestled in a narrow valley that winds among the Arkansas Ozarks and into the reader's imagination. The Ingledew saga - which follows six generations of 'Stay Morons' through 140 years of abundant living and prodigal loving - is the heart of Harington's jubilant, picaresque novel. Praised as one of the year's ten best novels by the American Library Association when first published, this tale continues to captivate readers with its winning fusion of lyricism and comedy.  Drawings by the Author.

When Angels Rest

Donald Harington's tenth Novel continues a fictional saga that draws its creative fuel from the author's memories of his Ozark Mountain childhood.  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 scarp 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.
Donald Harington's bittersweet tale reflects on the hilarity and calamity of childhood, the isolation that remains in intimacy, and the impending shadows of maturity that darken human nature.  By turns comic, sad, and violent, When Angles Rest is a masterful work, part American tall take, part hillbilly Paradiso.

Butterfly Weed

Harington brings his novelistic prowess to bear on the life story of the colorful physician of his acclaimed Stay More novels, Doc Swain.
It's quite a story, by turns raucous and poignant: how Doc Swain becomes a physician without benefit of medical school education, achieving celebrity for his ability to heal patients through the "dream cure," how he winds up a high school teacher of hygiene, how he grows enamored of a pretty student named Tenny at the same time he is being pursued by the insatiable music teacher Venda Breedlove (who slips him a love potion and makes him her sex slave for a day), and how his love for Tenny ultimately leads him to face some heartbreaking choices.
Bawdy, opulent, and funny, Butterfly Weed is an unforgettable addition to the world of Stay More, "a village," said one critic, "set beyond pavement and modern transportation, and sometimes beyond history and time itself."

Ekaterina

"Ekaterina you were, and you were not at all.  You were from a land far away, once upon a time and upon no time at all...."  So begins our friendly narrator, who happens to be dead.  Ekaterina has just arrived in an unnamed city at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela with a pasteboard suitcase, a kerchief that covers her lack of hair, and little ore than a rudimentary knowledge of English, the language in which she will eventually write Georgie Boy and her other phenomenal best-sellers.
Ekaterina is guided throughout her adventures not only by the ghost-narrator -who has mysterious motives of his own for meddling with her personal Fate Goddess- but also by an "author" determined to bring her, in time, to his homeland, the Bodark Mountains.
At every turn, Ekaterina's rise to fortune is rattled by her consuming appetite for pubescent boys.  Her novel Georgie Boy earns her wealth enough to take over the top floor of an aging resort hotel in the Bodarks, as her idol, Nabokov , had taken over a suite in a Swiss resort hotel after the success of Lolita.  Indeed Ekaterina's story becomes, in ways planned and unplanned, something of a wicked inversion of Nabokov's novel...  with many twists of it's own.
Ekarterina is a masterwork of illusion and allusion, and like all of Donald Harington's novels it affords delight from beginning to end.