Donald Harington Praised and Remembered
Our obituary note yesterday about Donald Harington evoked several tributes.
Arsen Kashkashian, head buyer at the Boulder Bookstore, Boulder, Colo., wrote:
Although his novels were set in a region of the country that I have never visited, Donald Harington made Stay More, Ark., feel like a bizarre home. It's upsetting that Harington never broke through to the larger audience that he richly deserved. He was a terribly funny writer with a great satirical streak and the ability to write some of the oddest sex scenes I've ever read. I thank Toby Press for keeping the work of this important writer in print. The two novels I'd highly recommend are The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks and Thirteen Albatrosses.
Mark Levine, former sales director at St. Martin's and Holt, wrote:
I first discovered Donald Harington while, as a sales rep, climbing the dusty stacks of Bookazine, I was struck by the original and startlingly lovely Wendell Minor jacket. I took the book home on Bookazine owner Bill Epstein's two-for-one book swap program (one contributed two of one's own samples for one from another publisher). Reading it, I asked myself--even then--why hadn't I heard of this guy? Harington was demonstrably a find, a discovery and he brought me countless hours of enjoyment, thought and laughter with each new book and the re-reading, many times, of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Let Us Build a City and Some Other Place, the Right Place, my favorites.
I have always been a missionary for him, and particularly so in the two weeks preceding his untimely passing, after I read his latest. Enduring is a treasure and a summation of the saga with the air of a finale, but Harington characteristically and self-referentially includes a few hints that there might be others. We should all hope that these manuscripts are in the hands of his publisher, Toby Press. I hope that talking up this book will provide Don Harington, RIP, with the wide recognition he has always deserved. His aggregate work is among the very best fiction of our lifetime.
Steve Fischer, executive director of the New England Independent Booksellers Association, wrote:
Don Harington was my art history professor at Windham College in Putney, Vt. (John Irving was my creative writing teacher there, too). Little did he know that he had a future sales rep sitting in his lecture hall! I wish I'd kept up with him all these years, but I'm happy that he finally met the Toby reps and found out how human they really were.