Contents
1: Pray Without Ceasing
2: A Jonquil for Mary Penn
3: Making It Home
4: Fidelity
5: Are You Alright
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 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
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