Port William series

Mat Feltner struggles to accept the loss of his son as the rest of the Port William community watches the progress of World War II.

It is 1976 and Andy Catlett, farmer and agricultural journalist, is walking the streets of San Francisco at dawn. In the eight months since losing his right hand to a corn-picking machine, he has also lost himself. Two thousand miles from his home in Kentucky, he begins to remember people, the land, and the comfort of knowing his place intimately. Andy's reveries evoke a membership governed by the principles of humanity and love. Inspiring and eye-opening,...

"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 A celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return listeners to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar...

In a rural Kentucky river town, 'Old Jack' Beechum, a retired farmer, sees his life again through the shades of one burnished day in September 1952. Bringing the earthiness of America's past to mind, The Memory of Old Jack conveys the truth and integrity of the land and the people who live it. Through the eyes of one man can be seen the values Americans strive to recapture as they arrive at the next century.

In the latest installment in Wendell Berry's long story about the citizens of Port William, Kentucky, readers learn of the Coulters' children, of the Feltners and Branches, and how survivors 'live right on.' 'Ignorant boys, killing each other,' is just about all Nathan Coulter would tell his wife about the Battle of Okinawa in the spring of 1945. Life carried on for the community of Port William, Kentucky, as some boys returned from the war while...

Berry opens this latest installment of the Port William series with young Andy Catlett preparing to visit a place he'd been to many times before, though this would be an adventure he will take very seriously. Nine years old, Andy embarks on the trip by bus, alone for the first time. He decides it will be a rite of passage and his first step into manhood. Sometimes a handful at home, Andy was a good boy when visiting his Grandparents' houses, and he...