Product Description

Arkansas, 1914: A 13 year old girl is raped in the backwoods of the Ozarks. On her testimony, Nail Chism, from Stay More, is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair - until his innocence is championed by the staff artist of the state's leading newspaper, a woman whose past amongst the artists in Paris is even stranger and more solitary than Nail's. Will she succeed in saving Nail? Or will the singing - "Choiring" - of the trees that Nail hears while strapped into the chair be the last earthly (or unearthly) sound he will ever hear?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #803492 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 450 pages

From Publishers Weekly
As Nail Chism is led to the electric chair for the first time, he thinks he hears the trees singing in Stay More, his Ozarks hometown, a setting that Harington has used lovingly in his previous novels. But this book is a far cry from the larky irony of the anthropomorphic characters of The Cockroaches of Stay More . This is an intense, lyrical, moving story--based on fact--of an unjustly convicted criminal and the woman who saved his life. Harington makes of it a dramatic, engrossing narrative with the melodramatic pace of a cliffhanger, the tenderness of a pastoral romance, and the power of documentary-like descriptions of brutal prison conditions in Arkansas in the early 1900s. Falsely charged and convicted of raping a teenage girl, Chism is (temporarily) saved by a last-minute stay of execution. By that time, Viridis Monday, a newspaper artist covering the event, is convinced that he is innocent and begins a valiant campaign to gain his freedom. As usual, Harington renders his backwoods characters without patronizing or sentimentality, and he writes with sensitivity of the Ozarks life and landscape. Although sometimes the conceit of the singing trees becomes cloying, this is a significant novel that should please a wide audience.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Another in Harington's series of novels about Stay More, Arkansas, this book (based on actual events) depicts unsophisticated residents of the Ozarks as well as bohemian artists in Paris during the early days of Fauvism. When Nail Chism refuses to cooperate with corrupt local politicians, he is framed for rape and sentenced to death. Viridis Monday, a Paris-trained artist, is assigned to sketch his execution for a Little Rock newspaper. Convinced of Nail's innocence, she mounts a campaign to exonerate him. A skilled storyteller, Harington displays the brutality of prison life in 1914 as well as the tender love between Nail and Viridis. Although a few coincidences of plot are not entirely credible, the novel remains convincing and engaging.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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 storytellers. His academic career was in art and art history because, although determined to become a novelist (he wrote his first one at six), he felt that his ultimate teaching vocation should not interfere with his writing. He has taught art history at a variety of colleges in New York, New England, South Dakota and finally at his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for fifteen years in the same room where he first took courses in art history. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife Kim. His first novel, THE CHERRY PIT, about Little Rock, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published twelve other novels, most all of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. These include LIGHTNING BUG, SOME OTHER PLACE. THE RIGHT PLACE., THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ARKANSAS OZARKS, THE CHOIRING OF THE TREES, and, most recently, THIRTEEN ALBATROSSES. He has also written books about artists. He won 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 Arkansas Library Association. John Guilds in his anthology, ARKANSAS, ARKANSAS, wrote, "if Miller Williams ranks as the greatest poet born, bred, nurtured, and still living in Arkansas, Donald Harington is by the same standards Arkansas's greatest novelist." The Winter 2002 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY is a "Donald Harington Special Issue" with tributes from fellow novelists, scholarly essays, interviews, and a selection of his forty-year correspondence with William Styron.

Customer Reviews

Absolutely one of the most beautiful books I've ever read
Brilliant, romantic, moving, just wonderful

Top Read of 2002
I read 75-80 novels a year and this was hands down the best read of 2002. Moving, thought provoking, a wonderful historical characterization of a time and era, absolutely vivid characters, and surprises throughout. I always choose a top read of the year and this is the second time Mr Harington has topped the list for me. Not many novels make you feel you're there; this one does.

Easy as Breathing
This may be the most intimate, for me, of Harington's novels. TAOTAO was the first, and is the spine of all my Harington reading - but this one is easily the one my *girlish* heart loved most. It is the best balance of Harington's wild fancy and his talent for character development, and it is the book that feels like he must have had the same breezes in his fingers that live in Nail's trees. Merely seeing this title makes little hairs on my neck stand up a bit, this story is so affecting.

I want to go read it once more, and cry and smile as it carries me again.