The Nearly Complete Works of Donald Harington, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

Donald Harington is one of the finest, and yet least known, American novelists. Volume 1 of this definitive collection of Harington’s novels includes a new foreword by Ron Rash, the author of The Cove, and an Introduction by Peter Straub, the bestselling author of many books, including Ghost Story and Shadowland.
As Ron Rash writes in his Foreword, “No oeuvre in American literature, past or present, can equal the combination of joy, humor, and wonder contained in Donald Harington’s fifteen novels. He is America’s Chaucer.” This collection offers readers the opportunity to discover the fictional town of Stay More in the Arkansas Ozarks, the setting of most of Harington’s books, and enjoy an underappreciated treasure of American literature.

The Nearly Complete Works of Donald Harington includes five complete novels: (1) Lightning Bug; (2) Some Other Place. The Right Place; (3) The Architecture of the Ozarks; (4) The Cockroaches of Stay More; (5) The Choiring of the Trees.

Genres: Fiction, Ebooks

1908 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 20, 2012

About the author

Donald Douglas Harington was an American author. All but the first of his novels either take place in or have an important connection to "Stay More," a fictional Ozark Mountains town based somewhat on Drakes Creek, Arkansas, where Harington spent summers as a child.

Harington was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. He lost nearly all of his hearing at age 12 due to meningitis. This did not prevent him from picking up and remembering the vocabulary and modes of expression among the Ozark denizens, nor in conducting his teaching career as an adult.

Though he intended to be a novelist from a very early age, his course of study and his teaching career were in art and art history. He taught art history in New York, New England, and South Dakota before returning to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, his alma mater, where he taught for 22 years before his retirement on 1 May 2008.

Harington is acclaimed as one of America's greatest writers of fiction, if not one of its best known. Entertainment Weekly called him "America's greatest unknown writer." The novelist and critic Fred Chappell said of him "Donald Harington isn't an unknown writer. He's an undiscovered continent." Novelist James Sallis, writing in the Boston Globe: "Harington's books are of a piece -- the quirkiest, most original body of work in contemporary U.S. letters."

Harington died of pneumonia, after a long illness, in Springdale on 7 November 2009.

Harington's novels are available from The Toby Press in a uniform edition, with cover illustrations by Wendell Minor. Since his death, The Toby Press has made available the entire set of Harington novels as The Complete Novels of Donald Harington.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super hard to rate this. Have to go 4 stars for (possible) brilliance. However, I didn't like, and did not finish - granted this is a multi-book set, so to say I didn't finish isn't quite accurate. I finished several of the books. Some were pretty good. Memorable. "Some Other Place, The Right Place" is the one that did me in. I finished the loooooong (endless) slog through that book and said "I'm not sure if that was genius-level brilliant, or the craziest POS I've ever read." That particular book is not something I'd recommend to anyone, ever. Reading it was grueling.

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boo

I don't know why graphic sex has to be included in any book. It adds nothing g but sleaze to a story!

[Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the first novel and could not get in to it, definitely not a Steinbeck.

[Jane]

Did not like at all