With Andy Catlett, Wendell Berry returns to Port William in the midst of the Second World War, continuing a story he has been telling now for fifty years.
“Few write American English more limpidly than Berry. . . . 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)
Drawn from three collections of stories and including new work, That Distant Land extends over nearly a century of the Port William community. This book includes twenty-three stories from Wendell Berry's Port William membership arranged in their fictional chronology.
The Mad Farmer Poems Introduction by Ed McClanahan
Etchings by Abigail Rove
Wendell Berry has become “mad” at contemporary society. Gleaned from various collections of this amazing American voice, the poems take the shape of manifestos, insults, and Whitmanic ravings that are often funny in spite of themselves. The whole is a wonderful testimony to the power of humor to bring even the most terrible consequences into an otherwise unobtainable focus.
Wendell Berry offers the fable of Whitefoot, a mouse who lives at the edge of the woods, at what she believes to be the center of the world. Whitefoot’s great discovery of the universe around her, and her own ability to survive within it, is a lesson that’s sure to resonate with children and adults alike.
