Books by Wendell Berry and Complete Book Reviews

Wendell Berry, Author Gnomon Press $12.95 (98p) ISBN 978-0-86547-289-1
Although these psalm-like verses were written on the Sabbath, they are also songs in praise of the six days of labor that precede it. A poet, novelist and essayist, Berry is first and foremost a small farmer who works his ancestral land in rural...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry. Counterpoint (PGW, dist.), $24 (196p) ISBN 978-1-61902-488-5
“Valid criticism,” poet, conservationist, and national treasure Berry (The Unsettling of America) declares in his latest collection’s opening essay, “attempts a just description of our condition.” The book goes on to vivisect, with uncommon lucidity
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry. Counterpoint (PGW, dist.), $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-61902-049-8
Berry (Hannah Coulter) returns home to Kentucky in his 10th volume in the Port William Membership series with 20 new interconnected stories of the sleepy farming community and its townsfolk. Told from various perspectives and in cadenced reflections,
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry. Counterpoint, $14.95 paperback (128p) ISBN 978-1-61902-114-3
Poet, novelist, and farmer Berry restates his love for the land in these sonorous essays. The title piece, his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, posits that an abiding affection for place, such as his family's deep ties to rural Kentucky, is essential for "a...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry. Counterpoint, $30 (410p) ISBN 978-1-58243-815-3
“What must a man do to be at home in the world?” Berry asks early in this big, thick new volume: he has found decades of international fame by providing, in poems, fiction, memoirs, and essays, his clear and consistent answers. Widely admired as a...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Counterpoint LLC $25 (363p) ISBN 978-1-58243-029-4
The role of community in the shaping of character is a recurring theme in the work of poet, essayist and novelist Berry, as evidenced once more in this gratifying novel set in Berry's fictional Port William, Ky. Jayber Crow, town barber from 1937...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Counterpoint LLC $13.5 (124p) ISBN 978-1-58243-058-4
Living for almost 40 years on a family farm in Kentucky has led Berry to place a high value on local knowledge born of a long and affectionate engagement of the intellect and imagination with a particular place. To readers of his poems, novels (Memor
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Counterpoint LLC $12.5 (160p) ISBN 978-1-887178-54-9
The 1944 murder of the young protagonist's uncle accompanies him into adulthood. (Oct.)
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Counterpoint LLC $20 (160p) ISBN 978-1-887178-22-8
Brilliantly detailed characters and subtle social observations distinguish Berry's unassuming but powerful fifth novel. The T.S. Eliot Award-winning poet, essayist and novelist writes with the authority of a man steeped in the culture of a time and...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Counterpoint LLC $18 (128p) ISBN 978-1-887178-03-7
Berry, a novelist, poet and essayist (What Are People For?), focuses here on the importance of small communities in this latest collection of thought-provoking pieces. The decline of agriculture, according to Berry, was brought about by corporations
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Pantheon Books $21 (210p) ISBN 978-0-679-43469-6
Lumbering, likable, easygoing Kentucky farmer Ptolemy (``Tol'') Proudfoot, who weighs around 300 pounds, might at first seem an unlikely match for dainty, neat, tiny, prim schoolteacher Minnie Quinch, but their marriage in 1908, after a courtship...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Pantheon Books $20 (177p) ISBN 978-0-679-42394-2
In eight visionary or polemical essays, Berry ( Fidelity ) sounds the themes of decentralization, renewal of community and ecological awareness that inform his previous books. Assailing the U.S. government's role in the Persian Gulf War, the...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Pantheon Books $20 (80p) ISBN 978-0-679-42609-7
Berry's first collection since 1987 reads like a compilation taken from the years since, including occasional pieces, political satire and what seem like sketches. The influences are as diverse as Blake, Williams, and the later Yeats (``He served...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author North Point Press $11 (0p) ISBN 978-0-86547-331-7
In the course of a single day in 1976, the span of this elegiac novel, while in San Francisco attending a conference on agricultural technology, an emotionally troubled journalist wanders through pre-dawn streets reflecting on the early days of his...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author North Point Press $19.95 (210p) ISBN 978-0-86547-420-8
Poet, novelist and critic Berry ( Remembering ) identifies himself as ``a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts,'' thereby indicating the scope of these 22 prodding, opinionated pieces. He touches on literary subjects as well as agrarianism,...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author . Shoemaker & Hoard $26 (464p) ISBN 978-1-59376-027-4
Set in a small Kentucky farming village, this collection of Berry's Port William stories illuminates the evolution of rural American life over the course of the 20th century. In 23 stories, Berry chronicles Port William from the 1880s to the...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author North Point Press $13.95 (146p) ISBN 978-0-86547-216-7
This collection of six interrelated stories, set in the 1930s through the '70s, portrays life in back-country Kentucky and its county seat, ""a dying town in the midst of a wasting country.'' Wheeler Catlett, the central, unifying figure, is a...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Pantheon Books $20 (201p) ISBN 978-0-679-41633-3
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...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Counterpoint LLC $24 (196p) ISBN 978-1-58243-562-6
Berry, an outspoken cultural critic, agrarian and prolific author (with more than 50 books), writes that imagination ""brings what we want and what we have ever closer to being the same. It is the power that can save us from the prevailing...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author Counterpoint LLC $13.95 (128p) ISBN 978-1-887178-28-0
A collection of essays urging Americans to undertake greater involvement in their local communities. (Oct.)
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author . Counterpoint $23 (132p) ISBN 978-1-582435-34-3
In his 18th book of poems, Berry (Given ) rails against environmental destruction starting with the second poem: “While the land suffers, automobiles thrive.” He mixes philosophy, religion, politics, and personal experience in poems...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author . Shoemaker & Hoard $25 (190p) ISBN 978-1-59376-036-6
"This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed.... This is my story, my giving of thanks." So begin the reflections of...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author . Shoemaker & Hoard $24 (140p) ISBN 978-1-59376-136-3
Readers familiar with rural Kentucky novelist (A Place on Earth ), poet (A Timbered Choir ) and essayist (Another Turn of the Crank ) Berry and his vast repertoire will feel right at home in this slim, memoirlike novel narrated by the elderly Andy...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author, Susan Denaker, Read by , read by Susan Denaker. Christian Audio $23.98 (0p) ISBN 978-159644-533-8
Susan Denaker brings twice-widowed farm wife Hannah to life with soft-spoken but resolute dignity. As the 20th century closes and a new millennium begins, the elderly—yet fiercely self-sufficient—Hannah reflects on her past, especially...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author, Daniel Kemmis, Contribution by, Courtney White, Contribution by . Shoemaker & Hoard $24 (180p) ISBN 978-1-59376-077-9
Called "the prophet of rural America" by the New York Times , Berry has spent the last 40 of his 71 years simultaneously farming a hillside in Kentucky and issuing a stream of poems, novels and essays (including The Gift of Good Land and...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author, Paul Michael, Read by , read by Paul Michael. Christian Audio $29.98 (0p) ISBN 978-1-59644-485-0
Christian Audio continues on its ambitious course to bring Wendell Berry's Port William Membership novels to the audio format with accomplished narrator Paul Michael once again demonstrating his tremendous range. Set in the closing months of...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author, Paul Michael, Read by , read by Paul Michael. Christian Audio $34.98 (0p) ISBN 978-1-59644-444-7
Jayber Crow, town barber in Port William, Ky., recounts his life journey, which parallels the decline of sustainable agriculture throughout rural America. The agrarian threads also run through the novel's romantic triangle, in which Crow pines
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author, Paul Michael, Read by . Christian Audio $23.98 (0p) ISBN 978-1-596-44446-1
Poet, essayist and fiction writer Wendell Berry has established himself as the consummate writer's writer. His grounding in agrarian themes—both sociologically insightful and intimately personal—harks back to the rich tradition of...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author, Davis Te Selle, Illustrator , illus. by Davis Te Selle. Counterpoint $22 (60p) ISBN 978-1-58243-432-2
This small-format, gifty offering from an acclaimed author is not necessarily a children's book; the story it tells, in prose, will absorb adult admirers of literary craftsmanship as thoroughly as it does children. When Whitefoot the mouse is...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry, Author, G. K. Chesterton, Joint Author, Blaise Pascal, Joint Author . Plough Publishing $19 (370p) ISBN 978-0-87486-926-2
Has there ever been a more hard-hitting, beautifully written, theologically inclusive anthology of writings for Lent and Easter? It's doubtful. Many readers may well find that this collection—a sequel to Plough's highly successful...
READ FULL REVIEW
Edited by Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee. The Golden Sufi Center (IPG, dist.), $24.95 (280p) ISBN 978-1-890350-45-1
In this series of essays, edited by Sufi spiritual teacher and author Vaughn-Lee (Prayer of the Heart in Christian and Sufi Mysticism), writers from different faith traditions mourn the damage done to the Earth. They call for spiritual rather than...
READ FULL REVIEW
W. Berry, Author, Wendell Berry, Author North Point Press $20 (192p) ISBN 978-0-86547-274-7
Novelist and poet Berry offers an eclectic group of essays on subjects ranging from economics and education to agriculture and the feminist movement. In ""Six Agricultural Fallacies,'' for example, he argues in his typically individualistic way,...
READ FULL REVIEW
Edited by Paul Kingsnorth. Counterpoint, $26 (368p) ISBN 978-1-64009-028-6
Berry’s graceful essays have long been models of eloquence, insight, and conviction, as Kingsnorth’s selection of some of his most important pieces reminds readers. Berry’s writings traverse topics from agriculture to economics, but always circle...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry. Counterpoint, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-64009-581-6
Berry (The Peace of Wild Things) offers more stories of Port William, Ky., and his frequent protagonist Andy Catlett in this expansive collection, tracing Port William’s transition from a relatively bucolic village in the 1930s to its present-day...
READ FULL REVIEW
Wendell Berry. Shoemaker, $24 trade paper (528p) ISBN 979-8-9856798-0-9
In this rambling treatise, agrarian advocate Berry (The Unsettling of America) muses on race and patriotism, remembers his WWII-era Kentucky childhood, and ponders the future of a country fixated on industrialization and mobility. Contending that...
READ FULL REVIEW
X
Stay ahead with
Tip Sheet!
Free newsletter: the hottest new books, features and more
X
X
Email Address

Password

Log In Forgot Password

Premium online access is only available to PW subscribers. If you have an active subscription and need to set up or change your password, please click here.

New to PW? To set up immediate access, click here.

NOTE: If you had a previous PW subscription, click here to reactivate your immediate access. PW site license members have access to PW’s subscriber-only website content. If working at an office location and you are not "logged in", simply close and relaunch your preferred browser. For off-site access, click here. To find out more about PW’s site license subscription options, please email Mike Popalardo at: mike@nextstepsmarketing.com.

To subscribe: click here.