With
Authors: Donald Harington
Praise for Donald Harington’s
With
“
With
is among the best of many fine novels produced by Harington, and may be, for all its expansive humanity, his finest yet….
With
, in short, is a novel about everything that matters…. If any more life-affirming, more surprising, more beautifully written novel has been published in recent years, I've missed it. Don’t you, fellow readers, miss this one.”
The Boston Globe
“
With
is a joy to read…as whimsical as a paper-doll show while being deeply rooted in the earth; it gives the Garden of Eden myth a happy ending, and should find the wide readership that Harington so richly deserves.”
The Washington Post
“A sweet, lightly erotic fable about coming of age, real love and the gravitational force exerted by a sense of place…surprising, puckish, poignant…a fictive crazy quilt that accomplishes many things, none of which will leave its readers on steady ground.”
Time Out New York
“Transforming a kidnapping plot into an epic rural fable and then a touchingly poignant love story, Harington crafts a wildly imaginative tour de force…this powerful effort should further enhance his reputation as one of the great undiscovered novelists of our time.”
Publishers Weekly
, starred review
“It’s sexy, funny, and reaches a splendid crescendo as Robin grows into the full power of her womanhood, becoming both an Eve conceived in innocence but elevated beyond it to knowledge, and the crucial element in what can only be called a creation myth. A key work in Harington’s one-of-a-kind oeuvre.”
Kirkus
, starred review
“Imagine if Larry McMurtry somehow teamed with Laura Ingalls Wilder to craft a postmodern, magical realist fable that dropped her frontier homestead on the outskirts of his modern-day Thalia. That’'s the neat trick Harington pulls off with this richly imagined, lovingly rendered exploration of the unintended consequences of human—and animal—desire.”
Booklist
starred review
“…a marvelous story of improbable growth, heroic resolve, and life-giving love.
With
is still a Harington novel—which is to say a work of sprightly, delightful humor. But
With
mixes the light with the very dark…
With
conjures a magic that is exceptional even for Harington.”
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“Arkansas novelist Donald Harington has tilled his corner of the Ozarks for nearly 40 years, and the soil shows no signs of exhaustion. His yarns defy classification—one reason you haven’t seen them on a rack at your neighborhood supermarket. They combine old-fashioned, down home storytelling with postmodern, Nabokovian trickery…one of America’s rarer literary sensibilities.”
LA
Times
“A beautiful and terrifying story of self-reliance and flowering self-discovery…. Always a treat, Mr. Harington’s novels are stylistically inventive, warm and funny. Capturing the best in “Arkansas Traveler” mountain wit, with a depth rarely matched in modern fiction, Mr. Harington’s novels are not to be missed.”
Ghoti Magazine
“…
With
is many things: a crime story, a love story and a ghost story. It is a tale of survival and a homage to the natural world. It is a literary tour de force that takes readers on a wild ride—emphasis on the wild.
With
starts out like
Lolita
, then detours through
Swiss Family Robinson
before allowing its Odysseus to get back home to his true love. It sounds wacky and it is, but here’s the thing, here’s the marvelous thing: It works…. This is a clever, sensual, empathetic and, above all, moving book, and it should have lots of readers.”
The News & Observer
“Don Harington plumbs the resources of the novel form, from grammar and syntax—pronouns, verb tenses—to topics such as the missing father and genres such as animal fable, ghost story and Biblical myth…a rare entertainment…he is among our most daring Makers.”
The Providence Journal
“Harington makes the novel more and more formally playful by revealing deeper and deeper layers to the story and its narrator…burying ideas deep in the tale and only revealing them slowly and gradually, a story as striptease. As a result, the final hundred pages are as finely imagined and gorgeously whimsical as anything you’re likely to read this year.”
“The Arkansas novelist takes us to an imaginative place where we care deeply about each personality. And the ending, oh my, the ending. Suspense story. Love story. Ghost story. Coming-of-age story. Take your pick. Each one accurately describes this Ozarkian world you’ll love to inhabit.”
Southern Living
“If you aren't considered America's greatest novelist, there's a certain cachet to being known as ‘America's greatest unknown novelist.’ A number of contemporaries, colleagues and critics have put Donald Harington on that unknown throne—and he is certainly a legitimate pretender and contender…in
With
, we return to Stay More for a tale that may be the author’s most magical, mystical tour.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“…if readers give themselves to this demanding, suspenseful and joyful novel, it will thrive in their hearts and imaginations. The success of
With
depends not only on readers’ willingness to go along with Harington on this perilous, inevitable, lovely journey, but on the exuberantly homely, humble and poetic Ozark language with which he fills the book. For almost 500 pages, this irresistible tide of unique talk and narration individualized for humans and animals, sweeps you along.”
The Memphis Commercial Appeal
“…will surprise and delight you…. Harington’s writing is at once playful and serious, tender, sexy, tragic, brutal and redemptive…. He never falters, and you never doubt him for a second.”
Bookpage
With
By the Author
The Cherry Pit
(1965)
Lightning Bug
(1970)
Some Other Place. The Right Place.
(1972)
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks
(1975)
Let Us Build Us a City
(1986)
The Cockroaches of Stay More
(1989)
The Choiring of the Trees
(1991)
Ekaterina
(1993)
Butterfly Weed
(1996)
When Angels Rest
(1998)
Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain)
(2002)
With
(2004)
The Pitcher Shower
(2005)
Farther Along
(2008)
Enduring
(2009)
Donald Harington
With
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2003 Donald Harington
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by AmazonEncore
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN: 978-1-61218-902-4
For Brian Walter
and Lynnea Brumbaugh-Walter
who believed
Contents