"AMERICA'S GREATEST UNKNOWN NOVELIST"
PUBLISHES TWELFTH NOVEL WITH TOBY PRESS

Donald Harington's With to be Released in April 2004

Acclaimed by critics as "an undiscovered continent" and "America's greatest unknown novelist," Donald Harington is a brilliant creator of fictional worlds rooted in his native Arkansas. His imagination is no less expansive than Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his language is rich in a uniquely American, southern idiom. WITH (Toby Press, April 2004, $19.95), his twelfth novel, is a sensual, irresistible tale, full of unexpected twists and turns, impossible to categorize. 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 completely new variety of 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 an engaging, fascinating and ultimately triumphant story of survival - and the most original love story ever told.

Donald Harington was born and raised in Little Rock, but he spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother's hometown. 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 storytellers. His first novel was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published ten others, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. With is his twelfth novel. Harington has won the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize, the Heasley Prize, and the Arkansas Fiction Award, and was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999.

Harington's 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, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for fifteen years. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife Kim.