Title: Ekaterina
First published: 1993
Description: "Ekaterina you were, and you were not at all. You were from a land far away, once upon a time and upon no time at all..." So begins our friendly narrator, who happens to be dead. Ekaterina has just arrived in an unnamed city at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela with a pasteboard suitcase, a kerchief that covers her lack of hair, and little more than a rudimentary knowledge of English, the language in which she will eventually write Georgie Boy and her other phenomenal best-sellers. Ekaterina is guided throughout her adventures not only by the ghost-narrator - who has mysterious motives of his own for meddling with her personal Fate Goddess - but also by an "author" determined to bring her, in time, to his homeland, the Bodark Mountains.

At every turn, Ekaterina's rise to fortune is rattled by her consuming appetite for pubescent boys. Her novel Georgie Boy earns her wealth enough to take over the top floor of an aging resort hotel in the Bodarks, as her idol, Nabokov, had taken over a suite in a Swiss resort hotel after the success of Lolita. Indeed Ekaterina's story becomes, in ways planned and unplanned, something of a wicked inversion of Nabokov's wicked novel...with many twists of its own. Ekaterina is a masterwork of illusion and allusion, and like all of Donald Harington's novels it affords delight from beginning to end.
Subjects: Fiction, Psychiatric hospital patients, Women authors, Teacher-student relationships, Pedophilia, Fiction, general
Places: Arkansas, Soviet Union