Donald Harington's "The Pitcher Shower"

Donald Harington is the author of over a dozen novels in addition to several books about artists. (His academic career was in art and art history.)

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).

Harington applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Pitcher Shower (2005) and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Pitcher Shower just happens to contain two of my "signature" subjects: sex and magic. It is the first time in his life that my hero, Hoppy Boyd, had a "second coming." And it contains a depiction of his girlfriend's "fascinators," a kind of sheer scarf that she uses in dances to entertain the public.

Read an excerpt from The Pitcher Shower, and visit Harington's website.

--Marshal Zeringue