The Cherry Pit [Paperback]

Donald Harington (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2007

Clifford Stone--quixotic curator of arcane Americana at a Boston antiques foundation and cataloguer of our "Vanished American Past"--forsakes Boston and his icy wife to return to his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, and a life that is both instantly familiar and disturbingly strange.

Cliff's journey home begins as a recovery mission, but it becomes a desperate search for, confrontation with, immersion in, and emergence from his lost past. In a series of libidinous, murderous, hilarious and anxious adventures, Cliff renews old friendships--including one with a girl he thought he'd forgotten--and makes some new enemies.

The Cherry Pit is a flamboyant, lascivious, comic novel about restoration and renewal--and, like all proper comic novels, a serious book.

Editorial Reviews

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.
His first novel was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published twelve other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists.
He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. He has been called "an undiscovered continent" (Fred Chappell) and "America's Greatest Unknown Novelist" (Entertainment Weekly).

Product Details

• Paperback: 461 pages
• Publisher: Toby Press (April 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592641784
• ISBN-13: 978-1592641789
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,255,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Donald Harington was one of America's greatest writers of fiction. His fifteen novels have been called jubilant, lyrical, foxy, captivating, delicate, bawdy, playful, reckless, joyful, courageous. Set in the fictional hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas, Harington's stories blend myth, dreamscape and sharply observed speech and manners to depict a rich, eccentric, rural society. All fifteen novels--from the classic Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, to the redemptive Choiring of the Trees, the love story With and the concluding novel Enduring, published just two months before Mr. Harington's death-- are now available as The Complete Novels of Donald Harington, a must-have collection for all those who wish to read the very best, authentic, contemporary American writing.

"The quirkiest, most original body of work in contemporary US letters." -Boston Globe

"Harington is hooked into the deepest traditions of storytelling, dipping his buckets directly into the well it all comes from, pursuing a literature dedicated not to documentation or self-expression, but to fascination, to lifting us out of ourselves and the dailiness of our lives -- to making our world again wondrous and large." --Los Angeles Times

"Totally satisfying... Harington reveres the most ordinary aspects of the lives of unexceptional people...he makes his joy infectious." --Time Magazine

Donald Harington (1935 -2009) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and spent nearly all of his childhood 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 dialect and the old tales told by local storytellers. He published his first novel in 1965, and fourteen more for a total of fifteen, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, loosely based on Drakes Creek. Acclaimed by critics as "an undiscovered continent," "America's Chaucer," and "one of the most powerful, subtle and inventive novelists in America," Harington was the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize, the Heasley Prize, and the Oxford American Lifetime Achievement Award.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible!, June 20, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Cherry Pit (Paperback)

Harington has once again captured the very essence of life in the South. This story is an entertaining romp that, like all good comic novels, has a very serious side to it. I have never read a better exploration of the human need to have a place to call home. Throughout the entire book, Harington keeps you entertained with murderous, lascivious, and affable adventures that will have you laughing hysterically and pondering the meaning of life at the same time

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You cant go home again, August 31, 2003

By 

Manola Sommerfeld (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cherry Pit (Paperback)

My edition has a great illustration on the front cover. A man is on a bridge overlooking a river. In his background, there are green hills, a church, farmhouses. The image reflected on the water, though, shows skyscrapers and a gilded dome. Such is Clifford's dilemma, For those of us who have a love-hate relationship with our hometown, this book is a must. The back cover of my copy speaks of restoration and renewal. To me the novel had more to do with coming to terms with your past. Cliff is in a sense overcome with nostalgia. He is on the brink of obsession with the way things used to be. He is soon to be 30, and is going through an early middle-age crisis. Always solution-oriented, Cliff goes back home in hopes to find answers to his questions, and even considers relocating there (even though he knows that is impossible). The novel narrates his adventures and misadventures during his time in Little Rock. He rediscovers who his true friends are, and in the process makes a few enemies. Most interesting is his relationship with Dall, his best buddy but a terrible racist. Clifford "converts" him by example, without trying, and the process sounds totally believable, when it would have been very easy to make it look like a fairytale. Cliff's relationship with Margaret, his high-school sweetheart and a very messed up woman, is also well explained. I have always had a friend back home who cannot stop telling me how great it is to still live there.

Although there is a lot of humor (the scene in the pool house had me in stitches), this is ultimately a serious novel, that shows how nostalgia is a mistake.

4.0 out of 5 stars Farther Before, May 25, 2009

By 

audreydog (Arkansas) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Cherry Pit (Paperback)

Entertaining romp through Little Rock and Hot Springs. It's been over ten years since I read this, but I can still remember several scenes vividly. It was good to read last year what finally became of ol' Clifford. Wonderful!