This work brilliantly fuses travel narrative with
history and cultural studies—yet reads like a novel. It’s also a love story that is in no way fictional. A fan letter to the author from a woman named Kim starts a correspondence which details research she’s conducting in one-horse towns throughout Arkansas.
In the years of rural decline many of these towns dwindled to church, post office, general store, gas station, and a few rundown houses—but every house has a porch, every porch a rocker, and every rocker an old man or woman with a story.
Kim and Don agree to collaborate on a book—this one—creating a unique and enchanting work about towns that will never again be their old selves and towns that never fulfilled the brave dreams of their founders. And at the end of the adventure the author and Kim meet, having learned something of expectation and hope—and love. With photos and maps.
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.
Acclaimed by critics as “an undiscovered continent” and “America’s greatest
unknown novelist” Harington is a brilliant creator of fictional worlds rooted in his native
Arkansas and his language is rich in a uniquely American, southern idiom.
Winner of the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize, the Heasley Prize, and in 2006 the
first Oxford America Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to Southern Literature.
Author Website
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The Critics Praise:
"One need not be familiar with Arkansas to appreciate this tour of lonely highways; there are lost towns everywhere. But seldom are they explored with such joy and wonder as in this gem of a book." - Amazon.com
"...There are tales of floods, fires, gold rushes, gunshots, feuds, booms and (mostly) busts, along with other tidbits so strange they could only be true. By themselves, these would be deeply entertaining yarns. In Harington's hands, however, they amount to eloquent requiems for all his stunted cities." - Shawn Carkonen
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