The Guestroom Novelist

Download or read book The Guestroom Novelist written by Donald Harington and published by . This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Who was Donald Harington, "America's greatest unknown writer" (Entertainment Weekly)? The Guestroom Novelist: A Donald Harington Miscellany gathers extensive interviews and previously unpublished or uncollected essays, articles, and reviews by the Arkansawyer novelist that together reveal how a life of devastating losses and disappointments inspired the "quirkiest, most original body of work in contemporary U. S. letters" (Boston Globe). In detailed commentaries on the origins and evolution of all fifteen of his novels, the author explains how his ardent quest for "lost places in the heart" gave birth to Stay More, the fictional Ozarks town that provided his novels' setting and earned him the nickname of the "Faulkner of the Ozarks." Here, a career-spanning and eclectic selection of nonfiction illuminates the expansive philosophical and intellectual foundations upon which the author built the delightful tales of his beloved "Stay Morons." At times a dogged Captain Ahab, stalking the tantalizing and infuriating white whale of publishing success, at others an irrepressible Don Quixote of folk culture, magically finding in the hillbilly's humble homespun an imaginative giant worthy for the lance of his keenly-aimed writer's wit, Harington dramatizes both the challenges and the triumphs built into the very notion of a distinctively 'American' literature. The Guestroom Novelist serves up a rich, eclectic portrait of the artist as a young, middle-aged, and fiercely funny old man, a testimony to the writer's magnificent ability to transform the seemingly crude stuff of our material existence into enduring art" --