Donald Harington Books In Order

Stay More Books In Publication Order

  1. Lightning Bug (1970)
  2. Some Other Place. The Right Place. (1972)
  3. Architecture Of The Arkansas Ozarks (1975)
  4. The Co*ckroaches of Stay More (1989)
  5. The Choiring of the Trees (1991)
  6. Ekaterina (1993)
  7. Butterfly Weed (1996)
  8. When Angels Rest (1998)
  9. Thirteen Albatrosses (2002)
  10. With (2003)
  11. The Pitcher Shower (2005)
  12. Farther Along (2008)
  13. Enduring (2009)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Cherry Pit (1965)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Let Us Build Us a City (1986)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Guestroom Novelist (2019)
  2. Double Toil and Trouble (2020)

Stay More Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Donald Harington Books Overview

Lightning Bug

Latha Bourne, the attractive postmistress of Stay More a small town in the Arkansas Ozarks didn’t expect to see Every Dill again. Now everyone in the village is surprised that Every had the nerve to reappear in this tale of loss and of finding.

Some Other Place. The Right Place.

It is June. Diana Stoving’s new Porsche has just broken down on the Garden State Parkway, and Diana, twenty one, freshly graduated from Sarah Lawrence, sits in a dealer’s showroom, waiting for repairs. Bored and impatient, Diana leafs through the local newspaper and by pure chance reads the news item that will change the course of her life, that will launch her on a year’s journey, a year of the strangest adventures she could ever hope to endure, suffer and enjoy. For it is this news item that leads her to meet Day Whittacker, a shy, eighteen year old Eagle Scout, who his high school English teacher, experimenting with ‘age regression’ claims is the reincarnation of a hellraising ocntryman named Daniel Lyam Montross, a man who had lived a wild, romantic life and died a violent death twenty years earlier. Together, Day and Diana disappear from New Jersey, setting out to explore the life and investigate the death of the man known as Daniel Lyam Montross. Through ghost towns and abandoned villages they journey, becoming in turn, amateur archaelogists, naturalists, sleuthss, historians, and inevitably and ultimately, lovers. And always the presence of Daniel Lyam Montross is with them. Dead, he is fated to die again. Is one or both of them also fated to die? One of Harington’s most devious narratives, and a precursor to the Stay More cycle.

Architecture Of The Arkansas Ozarks

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.

The Co*ckroaches of Stay More

With this wonderfully irreverent comic novel, Harington leaves off chronicling the human inhabitants of the Arkansas Ozark town of Stay More and turns his attention to its insect world. In depicting the cockroach community, who perambulate on gitalongs, apprehend their environment through sniff whips and commit unwitting malapropisms about the mysterious world of Man and Woman, Harington unleashes a sprightly, antic imagination.

The Choiring of the Trees

A rape and a wrongful condemnation a novel based on a true story. In Arkansas, 1914, a 13 year old girl is raped in the backwoods of the Ozarks. On her testimony, a young mountaineer is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair. With his celebrated storyteller’s art, Donald Harington has created a work rich in drama, passion, and texture, unforgettably bringing to life his characters, place, and era.

Ekaterina

The newest resident of a faculty mansion inhabited by ghosts and filled with drunks, writer Ekaterina soon takes over the top floor of the Halfmoon Hotel in Arcata Springs, where she takes on pubescent lovers.

Butterfly Weed

This is the life story of the colorful physician of Harington’s acclaimed Stay More novels, Doc Swain: how he becomes a physician without benefit of medical school education, how he winds up as a high school teacher of hygiene and enamored of a pretty student, how his love for her ultimately leads him to face some heartbreaking choices. Bawdy, rich in language and detail, and very funny.

When Angels Rest

By turns comic, sad, and violent, Donald Haringtons tenth novel is a masterful work, part American tall tale, part hillbilly Paradiso.. 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. Yet when soldiers come to occupy the remote hills of Stay More in training for an invasion of Japan, the worlds war is brought closer to home, and the texture of rural life is irrevocably changed. Real news is a rare commodity in 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. One fixture of the paper is Dawnys regular report on the war between the Allies and the Axis, two roving bands of boys and girls whose fledgling identities are reflections of the global battles of World War II. Fighting with sticks and spears, and competing in scrap drives and verbal jousts, the children who call themselves Japs and Na*zis know their true enemies to be the Allies, who are also the town bullies: Sog Alan, Larry Duckworth, and John Witter. But the tenor of these games changes as developments bring the worlds war closer to home: the crackle of the towns first radio delivers bad news on a daily basis, 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 isolated hills in training for an invasion of Japan. As the ways of outsiders seep into the tiny hamlets routines, the texture of rural life is irrevocably changed. By turns comic, sad, and violent, When Angels Rest is a masterful work, part American tall tale, part hillbilly Paradiso.

Thirteen Albatrosses

The most rollicking and guiltlessly entertaining political novel in yearsFor decades Donald Harington has delighted fans with his thrilling, magical tales of Stay More, a small enclave in northern Arkansas. Now Harington expands on his fictional realm with the strange, quixotic quest of Vernon Ingledew to win the governorship of Arkansas. Ingledew, a polymath of surreal properties, is soon hampered by what his opponents refer to as his ‘Thirteen Albatrosses.’ Among them: he is an atheist; lives in sin with his first cousin; and believes in ‘extirpating’ that is, getting rid of hospitals, prisons, tobacco, and handguns. Nevertheless, Ingledew attracts to his campaign some of America’s heaviest political hitters. Together they form Ingledew’s Seven Samurai, aides whose devotion will be tested by kidnappings, adulterous love affairs, and defection to the rival campaign of the vulgar, hated Arkansas Governor Shoat Bradfield a Republican. Providing readers with an education in the dizzying whirligig of contemporary politics, Thirteen Albatrosses is wickedly funny and presciently topical entertainment of the highest order.

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 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 Night’s Dream, and hope that it will prove popular with audiences who expect horses and Hopalong Cassidy.

Farther Along

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 find he himself wants to vanish. So with the help of a book on the life an culture of a vanished tribe of Indians known as Bluff dwellers, he takes up residence in the wilderness of the Ozark mountains. But after 6 years of this life he realizes that what he is trying to get away from is himself. With the gentle humor and earthy passion that characterize all of his novels, Donald Harington attempts to offer some knowing and some understanding, father along.

Enduring

Forty years ago, Donald Harington created a little town of Stay More, hidden away in the hills of the Ozarks. He populated it with generations of families that had escaped the Appalachians in serach of more room, greener pastures, freedom from convention, sweeter air and water, or, simply, a world where time and history don’t matter. In Enduring, Harington continues the themes of the Stay More series and reveals, for the first time, the mysteries of the life of Latha Bourne, the hero*ine and demigoddess of Lightning Bug, The Choiring of the Trees, and other Harington classics, who is set apart from her fellow Stay Morons, as Harington affectionately calls them, by her beauty, wit, mystery and intense, unfulfilled sexuality.

The Cherry Pit

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.

Let Us Build Us a City

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.

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