Description:

For more than fifty years, Wendell Berry has been telling us stories about Port William, a mythical town on the banks of the Kentucky River, populated over the years by a cast of unforgettable characters living in a single place over a long time. In this new collection, the author’s first piece of new fiction since the publication of Andy Catlett in 2006, the stories date’s range from 1864, when Rebecca Dawe finds herself in her own reflection at the end of the Civil War, to one from 1991 when Grover Gibbs’ widow, Beulah, attends the auction as her home place is offered for sale. It feels as if the entire membership, all the Catletts, Burley Coulter, Elton Penn, the Rowanberrys, Laura Milby, the preacher’s wife, Kate Helen Branch, Andy’s dog, Mike, nearly everyone returns with a story or two, to fill in the gaps in this long tale. Those just now joining the Membership will be charmed. Those who’ve attended before will be enriched. The story of the community of Port William is one of the great works in American literature. Published in the author’s 78th year, this collection, the tenth volume in the series, is the perfect occasion to celebrate his huge achievement. "And so it’s all gone. A new time has come. Various ones of the old time keep faith and stop by to see me, Coulter and Wilma and a few others. But the one I wait to see is Althie. Seems like my whole life now is lived under the feeling of her hand touching me that day of the sale, and every day still. I lie awake in the night, and I can see it all in my mind, th old place, the house, all the things I took care of so long. I thought I might miss it, but I don’t. The time has gone when I oculd do more than worry about it, and I declare it’s a load off my mind. But the thoughts, still, are a kind of company." -- Beulah Gibbs ** ### From Booklist *Starred Review* Like the rest of Berry’s fiction, more than 50 years of it, beginning with the novel Nathan Coulter (1960), these 20 stories are about what one of the most developed of the characters, Burley Coulter, calls the membership of Port William, a farming community in Kentucky not far south of the Ohio River. This is the author’s region, too, and decades of his family and their neighboring friends, from the Civil War era to the present, are the models for the people in his fiction. Presented chronologically, these stories span the entire period covered in Berry’s work, from 1864 to nowadays. 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. --Ray Olson ### About the Author Wendell Berry is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the National Humanities Medal, the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For more than forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky.