"Inspired, playful storytelling from one of our most consistently original (and impish) novelists who now returns to his Ozark version of Shangri-la - the village of Stay More, a place hard to find but infinitely harder to leave. This latest installment, a history of the complex love life and remarkable medical achievements of Doc Colvin Swain, Stay More's "dreaming Doctor," is no different: Apprenticed as a young boy to a hill doctor, he learns to use both a wide range of herbal remedies and conventional cures. The most painful
irony of Swain's career is that beautiful, beloved Tenny, the true love of his life, is the one patient he can't save. She dies, horribly, of tuberculosis. But, this being Stay More, she lingers on as a spirit, watching over Doc, waiting for him. Such material would evaporate in the hands of a lesser novelist. But Harington, an ingenious, wise storyteller and a sly stylist, able to catch the
tang and vigor of the spoken word, makes Doc and the other inhabitants of Stay More seem as real as the mountains they inhabit - and also as mysteriously timeless."
- Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
 Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother's hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by story-tellers. His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas.
His first novel was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published twelve other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists.
He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. He has been called "an undiscovered continent" (Fred Chappell) and "America's Greatest Unknown Novelist" (Entertainment Weekly).
Author Website
| |
|
