Farther Along - Softcover

Harington, Donald

3.7

82 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1592642594 ISBN 13: 9781592642595

Publisher: Toby Pr, 2009

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

He wants to get away from it all. Despite a satisfying career as chief curator of a museum devoted to the vanished American past, he find he himself wants to vanish. So with the help of a book on the life an culture of a vanished tribe of Indians known as Bluff-dwellers, he takes up residence in the wilderness of the Ozark mountains. But after 6 years of this life he realizes that what he is trying to get away from is himself. With the gentle humor and earthy passion that characterize all of his novels, Donald Harington attempts to offer some knowing and some understanding, father along.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harrington spent most of his summers in the Ozark mountian hamlet of Drakes Creek, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of 12, he listened to the vanishing Ozark folk language and old tales told by storytellers. He has won the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize, the Heasley Prize, was inducted into the Arkansas Writer's Hall of Fame and has won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. In 2006, he was awarded the inaugural Oxford American award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Entertianment Weekly has named him America's Greatest Unknown Novelist.

From Publishers Weekly:

Escaping a devastating divorce by returning, in the 1970s, to his backwoods Ozarks roots, a successful, unnamed curator of American antiquities intends to drink himself to death. The Bluff-dweller, who narrates the first third of this quietly ambitious novel from veteran Harington (The Pitcher Shower, etc.), has installed himself in a cave near an abandoned village that retains a single resident, and old woman. She narrates the book's middle; her grandson, a millionaire pork packer, owns the town and most of the land around it—except the part that's a national park, overseen by a forest ranger, who suffers the Bluff-dweller's presence. Other characters include a moonshiner, and a historian, Eliza Cunningham, whose letters to a woman named Linda comprise the book's final third. The plot, such as it is, involves whether the village should be restored, and whether the old woman will be able to bring the Bluff-dweller and Eliza together. Despite unreliable narrators and heavy conceits, there's no sense of self-indulgence or self-consciousness to the seductive prose, which is laced throughout with wit and clever allusion. The result is a pleasing if perplexing read, with lots of observation but no real movement. (May)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.