Fidelity: Five Stories - Softcover

Berry, Wendell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679748318 ISBN 13: 9780679748311

Publisher: Pantheon, 1993

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

About the Author:

WENDELL BERRY is the author of more than two dozen books, including Fidelity,What Are People For?, The Unsettling of America and Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community. He lives and writes on his farm in Kentucky and teaches at the University of Kentucky.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this powerful new collection, the noted poet, essayist and fiction writer returns to Port William, Ky., the fictional town introduced in The Wild Birds. Berry's narrator roams easily through the town's past 100 years, remarking early in the book that even the unknown past is present in us, its silence as persistent as a ringing in the ears. 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.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0679748318
• ISBN 13: 9780679748311
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208