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When Angels Rest Book

For decades, novelist Donald Harington has been assembling a piecemeal epic of the Ozarks. Most of the installments have revolved around the hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas--a backwoods flyspeck that, like the genuine hamlets the author chronicled in Let Us Build Us a City, seems almost surreally removed from the American mainstream. And most of these books, including the superb Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, are supremely funny and observant fictions. Both of these adjectives apply to When Angels Rest, which is Harington's equivalent of the Iliad, circa 1942. The narrator, 12-year-old Dawny, is an avid participant in an ongoing set of war games. "There were the top dogs," he tells us, "led by fat Burl Coe until he got drafted and by Sog Alan in his absence, who called themselves Allies, from the privilege of feeling and sometimes being superior ... and there were the underdogs, who did not chose to be called Axis but had no choice. I certainly did not elect to be an Axis, let alone a despised Jap, but it fell my lot by default." In addition to being a foot soldier, Dawny is also an aspiring Ernie Pyle, who cranks out The Stay Morning Star entirely under his own steam. His narrative of this scaled-down war, and of the doings of his fellow Stay Morons, is as memorable as it is amusing. True, Harrington's energy seems to flag in the latter half of the book, when actual, gun-toting GIs are parachuted into the Ozarks for maneuvers--the last thing these characters need is an injection of reality. But When Angels Rest remains a touching, highly textured fable of childhood's end, narrated in an Arkansan twang that is the author's finest invention. --Bob BrandeisRead More

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  • Product Description

    Deep in the folds of the Arkansas Ozarks lies the tiny village of Stay More, population 179. Free from the intrusions of the modern world, this rural town is a living snapshot of days gone by. It is a place of tin roofs and pie suppers, of dirt roads, clear creeks, and a swinging bridge. Stars and fireflies are all that light the evening sky, and the only radio is hidden in Latha Bourne's General Store.

    Many travelers have searched for Stay More, but there is only one way to get there: through the fiction of Donald Harington. Harington has written ten Stay More novels, leading thousands of readers through the hills surrounding this mythical village, and introducing them to the charms of its eccentric population.

    Harington's new novel, When Angels Rest continues the Stay More saga, as the isolated village copes with the violent intrusions of World War II. A twelve-year-old named Dawny is the hero of this bittersweet tale, and he records the changing texture of local life in his weekly newspaper, The Stay Morning Star. Real news is a rare commodity, but Dawny-inspired by his hero Ernie Pyle-finds enough local color to keep the townsfolk reading. One fixture of the paper is Dawny's regular report on the war between the Allies and the Axis, two roving bands of boys and girls whose fledgling identities are reflections of the global battles of World War II. They fight on the playground and compete in scrap drives and verbal jousts, but the tenor of their games changes as developments bring the world's war closer to home. As the ways of outsiders seep into the tiny hamlet's routines, the texture of rural life is irrevocably changed.

    By turns comic, sad, and violent, When Angels Rest is a masterful work, part American tall tale, part hillbilly Paradiso. AUTHOR BIO: Donald Harington is an art history professor at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of one nonfiction book, Let Us Build Us a City, which won the Porter Prize for Literary Excellence, and ten novels in the Stay More saga. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife, Kim.

  • 1887178074
  • 9781887178075
  • Donald Harington
  • 14 August 1998
  • Counterpoint,U.S.
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 250
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