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Published Nov 2022
256 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Thirteen new stories of the Port William membership spanning the decades from World War II to the present moment.
For those readers of his poetry and inspired by his increasingly vital work as advocate for rational land use and the right-size life, these stories of Wendell Berry's offer entry into the fictional place of value and beauty that is Port William, Kentucky. Berry has said it's taken a lifetime for him to learn to write like an old man, and that's what we have here, stories told with grace and ease and majesty. Wendell Berry is one of our greatest living American authors, writing with the wisdom of maturity and the incandescence that comes of love.
These thirteen new works explore the memory and imagination of Andy Catlett, one of the well-loved central characters of the Port William saga. From 1932 to 2021, these stories span the length of Andy's life, from before the outbreak of the Second World War to the threatened end of rural life in America.
"Simple, lyrical, immersive stories about work, neighbors, and the land...Berry has that gift for entertaining amid serious intent, and the many lighter, very human moments in his elegiac, cautionary, wistful stories keep them from sinking into jeremiad without diminishing his message. A fine collection by an enduring, endearing master." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This is a work of essential American literature." - Booklist (starred review)
"Lovingly written ... Taken together, the 13 chapters in Wendell Berry's How It Went create a tale that gently unwinds and doubles back on itself, not so much like a river but more like a flowering vine ... Berry's prose—in How It Went and just about everything else he's written over his long career—is imbued with compassion ... A book full of such gentleness, wisdom and humility seems preposterous in this day and age. It's also something of a miracle. We are lucky, in such times, to still have a writer like Wendell Berry." - BookPage (starred review)
"[An] expansive collection...Berry's humanity and clear-eyed intelligence steer the stories away from simple nostalgia and into a thoughtful analysis of how communities inevitably change over time. This accomplished author still has much to offer." - Publishers Weekly
This information about How It Went was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Wendell Berry, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among others. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.
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