The Reading Warehouse

Every time Hoppy enters a town in his truck, he is greeted with delight and anticipation, showered with warmth, offered meals, and more often than not, pretty girls trying to catch more than just his eye.

It's not that Hoppy is so special; it's the pitcher shows that he brings with him, the shoot-'em-ups and giddyappers that all the Ozark folk adore that have them lining up to welcome him. Hoppy's predictable routine and his struggles with his own self-loathing are challenged when a teenager succeeds in stowing away in his truck and proves to be a lot more than he seems.

Together they contend with a wily traveling preacher who dogs their heels, trying to steal away their audience with his message of salvation. This peddler of the Gospel is just as bent on making money as the peddler of the motion pitcher, and in his cunning he steals all of Hoppy's cowboy pitchers. The pitcher shower has no choice but to buy the only available pitcher he can find, a strange pitcher called A Midsummer Night's Dream, and hope that it will prove popular with audiences who expect horses and Hopalong Cassidy.

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 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).