The Choiring of the Trees (Stay More) - Softcover

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).

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?