Wendell Berry Audio

Andy Catlett is the latest installment in Wendell Berry’s Port William series, a distinct set of stories that Berry has been telling now for 50 years.

"Ignorant boys, killing each other,” is just about all Nathan Coulter would tell his wife about the Battle of Okinawa in November 1945. Life continued as some boys returned from the war while the lives of others were mourned.

From the simple setting of his own barber shop, Jayber Crow, orphan, seminarian, and native of Port William, recalls his life and the life of his community as it spends itself in the middle of the twentieth century.

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.

This, the first title in the Port William series, introduces the rural section of Kentucky with which novelist Wendell Berry has had a lifelong fascination.

The rhythms of this novel are the rhythms of the land. A Place on Earth resonates with variations played on themes of change; looping transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into found.

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.

That Distant Land collects twenty-three stories, interlinked with each other and with the other published "Port William" novels.

It is the summer of 1944, and nine-year-old Andy Catlett is engrossed in the wide easy countryside near Port William, Kentucky. But sadness, loss, and mystery invade Andy's world on a hot July afternoon when his Uncle Andrew is murdered.