Stand By Me

Praise for Wendell Berry: One of America's finest prose writers

Publishers Weekly

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

What unites [these stories] is a deep humanity, compassion and a sense of recognition that our modern lives unfolded at some point on Earth from stories such as these

Seattle Times

No writer has written of a place better or more completely than Wendell Berry has written of Port William

Arkansas Democrat Gazette

Berry is an American treasure; this collection belongs in all literary fiction collections

Library Journal

Berry's writing is graceful, poignant and compassionate, and his feel for the inner lives of his quirky rural characters makes for many memorable portraits. A valuable work of literature and historical set piece, this collection vividly captures the fabric of a kind of all-American life

Publishers Weekly

Berry is the master of earthy country living seen through the eyes of laconic farmers.... He makes his stories shine with meaning and warmth

Christian Science Monitor

A small treasure . . . part of a long line that descends from Chaucer to Katherine Mansfield to William Trevor.

Chicago Tribune

Wendell Berry writes with a good husbandman's care and economy . . . His stories are filled with gentle humor

New York Times Book Review

This is the most complete-and the most powerful-vision of any American writer in my time. The stories of the Port William Membership are a delight, a goad, and a testament less to what was than to what could be. They will leave no reader unmoved and unchanged

Bill McKibben

Wendell Berry gives us an intimate portrayal of the mind and heart of rural America. His graceful prose is truthful and eloquent. His tone is reliable and steady, like a good rain, sober and serious-all this and at times he is so funny you have to stop and roll on the floor

Bobbie Ann Mason

Intricate and beautiful, sad but strong

Washington Post

[Berry's] essays, poetry and fiction have fertilized a crop of great solace in my life, and helped to breed a healthy flock of good manners, to boot. As I travel this unlikely road of opportunity, as a woodworker and writer, sure, but most often as a jackass, I have his writings upon which to fix my mind and my heart, to keep my life's errant wagon between the ditches, as it were. Mr. Berry's sentences and stories deliver a great payload of edifying entertainment, which I hungrily consume, but it is the bass note of morality thumping through his musical phrases that guides me with the most constant of hands upon my plow.

Nick Offerman, New York Times bestselling author of Paddle Your Own Canoe

The local nature of their canny, comic tonalities [...] might lead browsers to take these Berry stories as merely quaint. That would be a mistake. In fact, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Berry has been expanding by contraction, husbanding by close focus - in Berry's case, on the familiar demesne of Port William, Ky... A masterpiece...Berry moves way beyond nostalgia toward an immersion in other lives that expresses itself as a sense of intimate apartness; a willingness to follow his characters, but not necessarily to change them. Poetry nestled inside prose: startlingly and classically moving

Kirkus Reviews

The stories express a biblical reverence for life and community, yet they're funny, too, and so beautiful

Booklist

What a wise and inspiring collection this is, although 'collection' hardly does it justice, it sounds far too piecemeal and ephemeral for a book with such a meditative and singular focus. It's so full of life, expanding the horizon as you read, revealing a wider and a deeper way of looking at the quotidian. Like Denis Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, or Seamus Heaney, Wendell Berry shows us that sometimes looking deeply into one world can become a profound way of looking at the whole world.

Barney Norris, author of FIVE RIVERS MET ON A WOODED PLAIN

A woven time-travelling book, about all that it is to be human, about love, land, life. Just beautiful. What an amazing writer he is. Short stories that link together like trees in a forest

Jackie Morris, co-author of THE LOST WORDS

This bewitching book, a collage amounting almost to a novel, formed of 18 short stories linked to each other by people and place, nourishes deep-seated memories of the old country ways...Berry writes with such wisdom and understanding of the Kentucky countryside and its people that it scarcely seems like fiction. These are stories about the importance of memory and history in the life of a community...they celebrate the visceral links between man and Nature...acutely observed and beautifully wrought...gently humorous, full of eccentricity, sometimes wistful and occasionally sad, but unfailingly enjoyable, rewarding, even joyful.

Country Life

Berry is a thought-provoking writer who uses humour and sorrow to evoke memorable characters, atmosphere and setting

Irish Times