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 Toby Press is pleased to announce that Donald Harington's With has been optioned for a feature film, by Bogner Entertainment. |
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
| |
The Critics Praise:
"With is very beautiful.... The book is Donald Harington at full stretch, with all that immensity of feeling that elevates his best books." - Peter Straub
"With is a curiously seductive story that steadily builds a kind of fabulistic power.... It's sexy, funny, and reaches a splendid crescendo.... A key work in Harington's one-of-a-kind oeuvre."
- Kirkus, starred review
|
