1. Thicker Than Liquor (1930)
2. Where Did They Go? (1947)
3. It Wasn't Me (1953)
4. The Boundary (1965)
5. That Distant Land (1965)
6. The Wild Birds (1967)
Wendell Berry is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For over forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky.
Praise for The Wild Birds
“Berry is a poet of landscapes and legacies: The Wild Birds is a
heartfelt exploration of the complex bonds between generations and
the ways in which a neighborhood is shaped by its common ties to
the land and undone when those connections weaken.” —San Francisco
Chronicle
“Berry is a superb writer. His sense of what makes characters tick
is extraordinary. His farmers love their land in a powerful bond
that moves them forward, generation after generation, with a sense
of fulfillments that seems unique in this day of disaffected heroes
and writers who turn to black humor when they must deal with
eternal verities . . . Short stories don't get any better than
these.” —People
“The Wild Birds is one of those books that remind one of the real
purpose and possibilities of the literary art. The good and simple
truth to which each of Berry's stories testifies is that its author
observes people carefully, understands them precisely, and cares
about them deeply; bombast, pretension, and narcissism are alien to
him . . . One has the refreshing impression that Berry doesn't give
a damn what's in and what's out; he writes what he wants to write.”
—The New Criterion
“Readers would have to look long and hard to find a more polished
and engaging collection of stories. Wendell Berry once again has
proven himself an original American prose voice.” —San Diego
Magazine
“In these stories, Berry traces the history of a loosely
affiliated, unofficial, fictional group of dead and living men and
women, 'the membership of the fields' in Port William, a community
in Kentucky's tobacco country . . . Told with the same
intelligence, craft, and reverence that characterize Berry's
novels, essays on agriculture, and poems, these stories have at
their core the necessity of human friendship, 'the good that has
been possible in the world . . . the good that is desirable in it.'
Highly recommended.” —Library Journal
“This collection of six interrelated stories, set in the 1930s
through the '70s, portrays life in backcountry Kentucky and its
county seat, 'a dying town in the midst of a wasting country.'
Wheeler Catlett, the central, unifying figure, is a lawyer whose
roots and sensibilities exfoliate from the soil of the surrounding
farmland. He is its voice and consciousness, its collective memory;
his 'clients,' who are also his friends, neighbors and kinfolk,
provide his cast of characters.” —Publishers Weekly
Praise for Fidelity
“Berry richly evokes Port William's farmlands and hamlets, and his
characters are fiercely individual, yet mutually protective in
everything they do. . . . His sentences are exquisitely
constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Each of these elegant stories spans the twentieth century and
reveals the profound interconnectedness of the farmers and their
families to one another, to their past and to the landscape they
inhabit.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
“Visionary . . . rooted in a deep concern for nature and the land,
. . . [these stories are] tough, relentless and clear. In a
roundabout way they are confrontational because they ask basic
questions about men and women, violence, work and loyalty.” —Hans
Ostrom, The Morning News Tribune
“The rarest (and highest) of literary classes consists of that
small group of authors who are absolutely inimitable. . . . One of
the half–dozen living American authors who belong in this class is
Wendell Berry. . . . [this] whole book is vintage Berry.” —Los
Angeles Times
“Birth, life, death and the primary institutions of family and
community are the axes on which the stories turn. Their plots are
as slender as fence posts: a soldier walks home at war's end; a
young woman with a mild fever ponders her first years of marriage;
a taciturn farmer takes his moribund father out of a hospital's
intensive care unit so the old man can die with dignity. But Berry
invests them with intense feeling, using the plain language of a
largely oral culture, building metaphors and similes that have the
clear ring of folk wisdom. His ground's–eye view of events can be
chilling, as when he sums up World War II as a great tearing apart.
If the stories seem somber in their emphasis on loss, the pains are
clearly leavened by the comforts of community and connectedness
that a small town can provide. An excellent introduction to one of
America's finest prose writers.” —Publishers Weekly
“In these five interrelated stories, Berry focuses once again on
the fictional town of Port William and on characters like Andrew
Catlett, the central figure of his novel The Remembering. Each
story dramatizes an individual crisis but also emphasizes an
abiding sense of community and the simple but solid agrarian values
that sustain it. Berry's tales . . . are engaging and display a
quiet but powerful dignity.” —Library Journal
“Berry has employed all the forms he works in—poetry, the essay,
fiction short and long—toward an examination of what it means to be
placed: what here and elsewhere he calls 'membership'; American
individualism–turned–loneliness seems like the nightmare that puts
his eloquence to greatest use . . . Ultimately, the prose of the
stories less illustrates the Port William values—forgiveness,
dignity, fidelity, community—than provides an indelible, surefooted
rhythm for them. Cadenced, eternal–seeming sentences plank
everything; there is an enchantment to them . . . Uncommonly
satisfying art and vision.” —Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Watch With Me
“Wendell Berry writes with a good husbandman's care and economy . .
. His stories are filled with gentle humor.” —The New York Times
Book Review
“Berry is the master of earthy county living seen through the eyes
of laconic farmers . . . He makes his stories shine with meaning
and warmth.” —Christian Science Monitor
“A small treasure of a book . . . part of a long line that descends
from Chaucer to Katherine Mansfield to William Trevor.” —Chicago
Tribune
“With the simplicity of folk tales, these stories beautifully evoke
a world where people live in relatively harmony with nature, the
land and community, and where neighborliness and human scale still
matter.” —Publishers Weekly
“This charming collection examines the lives of Tol and Miss Minnie
on their Kentucky farm from 1908 to 1941. Despite its universal
appeal, this book is distinctly Southern, rich with delightful
colloquialisms and the mores and attitudes of rural folk of that
time. Some stories are framed . . . underscor[ing] the fact that
storytelling and the past are integral to Southern society . . .
Every reader deserves the opportunity to meet Tol and Miss Minnie.”
—Library Journal
“These seven stories relate incidents in the life of a very good
man, Ptolemy—'Tol'—Proudfoot, towering final scion of a line of
Kentucky farmers loved for their gentleness, intelligence, and
gregariousness and their sense of and love for their place and work
in the world . . . Their diction is as chaste as a Bible story's;
they express a biblical reverence for life and community, yet
they're funny, too, and so beautiful.” —Booklist
“The local nature of their canny, comic tonalities, the old–timey
subtitle, and the fact that all the action takes place before 1942
might lead browsers to take these Berry stories as merely quaint.
That would be a mistake. In fact, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Berry
has been expanding by contraction, husbanding by close focus—in
Berry's case, on the familiar demesne of Port William, Ky . . . The
long title story, which closes the collection, is a masterpiece . .
. The tale clarifies Berry's direction, as he moves way beyond
nostalgia toward an immersion in other lives that expresses itself
as a sense of intimate apartness—a willingness to follow his
characters, but not necessarily to change them. Poetry nestled
inside prose: startlingly and classically moving.” —Kirkus
Reviews
Praise for Nathan Coulter
“An assured depiction of the coming of age of a young man in rural
America . . . By any standards an unusual and rewarding writer,
Berry is especially recommended to readers struggling with the
moral and ethical questions confronting contemporary Americans.”
—Newsday
“Spare, elegant and eloquent . . . [Nathan Coulter] is an absolute
jewel.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“The Coulter family, like the rest of the people who dwell in this
tiny farming community . . . are caught on the wheel of nature,
which is at once blindingly beautiful and unwittingly cruel . . .
The narrative is stunning, the natural scene is beautifully
evoked.” —Los Angeles Times
“Berry's prose, so carefully tuned you never know it is there,
carries us into the very heart of Nathan Coulter and into the land
itself.” —San Jose Mercury News
Praise for A Place on Earth
“The revised version of A Place on Earth is a masterpiece – the
best thing Wendell Berry has done, a book not to be missed.” —The
New York Times Book Review
“This is not a book to read at a sitting. It needs to be savored.
Written by a craftsman poet, every word is chosen with great care.
Many of Berry's poems reveal the same fascination with the rhythms
and cycles of rural living as A Place on Earth, just as his essays
reflect his integrity and common sense.” —Newsday
“Granted, when measured by the yardstick of the contemporary
fiction marketplace, A Place on Earth can certainly be described as
demanding, but the excellent production offers a feast of the
senses for discerning audiences.” —Publishers Weekly (starred
review)
Praise for The Memory of Old Jack
“Few novelists treat both their characters and their readers with
the kind of respect that Wendell Berry displays in this deeply
moving account . . . The Memory of Old Jack is a slab of rich
Americana.” —The New York Times Book Review
Praise for Remembering
“In Remembering, Wendell Berry has constructed an almost perfect
fiction, a sublime meditation on how irrevocable loss is redeemed
through a renewed sense of kinship with the land and the past . . .
A beautiful and ennobling book.” —Washington Post
“Berry writes with grace and eloquence of the beauty in handed–down
lives.” —Publishers Weekly
“[Andy's] journey from spiritual darkness to light, from wounded
alienation to healed community, conveyed by Berry's exact and
sensitive prose, constitutes an epic poem of American agriculture
as much as a short novel. In it, Berry weds more happily than ever
before his skills as one of our finest, keenest–eyed,
sharpest–eared poets to his moral concerns as our preeminent
philosopher of agriculture.” —Booklist
“This short, intensely lyrical novel celebrates 'the hope and dream
of membership' in a community of friends and relations, all of whom
share in each other's past and in their respect for nature...
[Remembering] ends as pure poetry.” —Kirkus
Praise for A World Lost
“Brilliantly detailed characters and subtle social observations
distinguish Berry's unassuming but powerful fifth novel . . .
Imbued with the textures, dialect and social mores of backwater
Kentucky during WWII, the narrative is pulled along by a chain of
revelations about the interior lives of the characters. Berry shows
us the psychic costs of misplaced family pride and social rigidity,
and yet he also celebrates the benevolent blessing of familial
love. This is simple, soul–satisfying storytelling, augmented by
understated humor and quiet insight.” —Publishers Weekly
“This time the poet/essayist/novelist turns his attention to
nine–year–old Andy Catlett, whose world is turned upside down in
1944, when his beloved Uncle Andrew is murdered. Still haunted by
the event years later, Andy researches the seldom–discussed details
in an effort to understand Uncle Andrew's fate. In doing so, he
learns a great deal about his uncle, his family, his neighbors, and
life in the late 1940s. This gentle tale deals with big issues:
grief, love, truth, and loss, and their effects on a young mind
trying to grow.” —Library Journal
“Like The Great Gatsby, Berry's fifth novel is concerned with an
extraordinary man's murder. Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway rehearses
and combs the events that led to the killing, but Berry's Andy
Catlett concentrates on the tragedy's effects on those who knew and
loved the victim, especially his family . . . Andy concludes with
the greatest thing he learned: suddenly or gradually, the momentary
material world and its people, no matter how cherished, pass away,
yet we remain 'in the company of the immortals with whom [we] have
lived here day by day.' Writing with his customary limpid grace,
Berry transforms an elegy into a hope–filled hymn.” —Booklist
“By the prolific poet, novelist, and social critic an elegiac
celebration of the end of innocence . . . Berry deftly balances
Andy's investigation into the town's past with an equally moving
portrait of his growing realization not only of the sustaining
value of memory but of the manner in which people are shaped in
enduring ways by what they love. This is a modest, resonant work,
both a sharp portrait of a small farming town nursing its secrets
over several decades, and a penetrating celebration of the hold of
family on the imagination.” —Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Jayber Crow
“The role of community in the shaping of character is a recurring
theme in the work of poet, essayist and novelist Berry, as
evidenced once more in this gratifying novel set in Berry's
fictional Port William, Ky . . . Berry's narrative style is
deliberately traditional, and the novel's pace is measured and
leisurely . . . It is to Berry's credit that a novel so freighted
with ideas and ideology manages to project such warmth and
luminosity.” —Publishers Weekly
Praise for Hannah Coulter
“Berry renders abstractions like community and home as breathing
organisms. . . . Berry's stories are meant to welcome, to be
retold, repeated and handed down to cement the bonds between
generations and among neighbors . . . It's a rare novel that can
make one yearn so comprehensively for self–improvement.” —San
Francisco Chronicle
“Hannah Coulter is set in the latter half of the past century, but
like the best contemporary fiction, it is informed by our present
moment.” —Seattle Times
“[F]ew write American English more limpidly than Berry, and he has
realized his characters as thoroughly as Faulkner did any of the
people of Yoknapatawpha County. But as this telling of a farm
woman's life in her voice continues—and voice it seems more than
writing, so spontaneously speechlike are its cadences and the
simple accuracy of its diction—it feels ever more poetic . . . “
—Booklist (starred review)
“Beneath the story of ordinary lives lies the work of an
extraordinarily wise novelist: as Hannah relates her children's
fate to her own deeply rooted rural background, she weaves
landscape and family and history together . . . Her compassion
enlivens every page of this small, graceful novel.” —Publishers
Weekly (starred review)
“Atmospheric and quietly moving: a tale that manages to avoid
outright bathos as it makes its way along the narrow boundary
between memoir and nostalgia.” —Kirkus Reviews
Praise for That Distant Land
“What unites [these stories] is a deep humanity, compassion and a
sense of recognition that our modern lives unfolded at some point
on Earth from stories such as these.” —Seattle Times
“No writer has written of a place better or more completely than
Wendell Berry has written of Port William.” —Arkansas Democrat
Gazette
“Berry is an American treasure; this collection belongs in all
literary fiction collections.” —Library Journal
“Berry's writing is graceful, poignant and compassionate, and his
feel for the inner lives of his quirky rural characters makes for
many memorable portraits. A valuable work of literature and
historical set piece, this collection vividly captures the fabric
of a kind of all–American life.” —Publishers Weekly
Praise for Andy Catlett: Early Travels
“Readers familiar with rural Kentucky novelist (A Place on Earth),
poet (A Timbered Choir) and essayist (Another Turn of the Crank)
Berry and his vast repertoire will feel right at home in this slim,
memoir–like novel narrated by the elderly Andy Catlett.”
—Publishers Weekly
Praise for A Place in Time
“Readers of Berry's other fiction will know some of the
narrators—humorous, independent, compassionate Burley Coulter;
lifelong but by no means unromantic bachelor Jayber Crow; and
quietly magisterial Andy Catlett, the most frequent storyteller and
Berry's surrogate. The incidents range from Andy's
great–great–grandmother's face–off with a renegade soldier to
Burley's eyewitness account of the unwillingly outrageous courtship
of Big Ellis to Andy's young son Marcie's reaction to the sudden
death of Elton Penn, the finest farmer his father ever knew. The
language is warm and cool, as called for; consists mostly of one–
and two–syllable words; and constitutes a style as clean and
distinctive as Hemingway's, as perspicacious as Mark Twain's.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Berry is a maker of beautiful sentences, lightly touched with
Southern dialect and soberly concerned with the future of the
agrarian spirit.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Berry (Hannah Coulter) returns home to Kentucky in his 10th volume
in the Port William Membership series with 20 new interconnected
stories of the sleepy farming community and its townsfolk. Told
from various perspectives and in cadenced reflections, these quiet
and meditative “relics and scraps of memory” speak eloquently of
familial and romantic love, slavery and war, loss and time's slow
but inevitable passing, all with a solemnity and candor often found
in Faulkner or Twain . . . For longtime fans and those new to the
series, this rich slice of evolving Americana is just as poignant
and enjoyable as ever.” —Publishers Weekly
Ask a Question About this Product More... |