Bøker av Wendell Berry

'He is unlike anybody else writing today ... After Donald Trump's election, we urgently need to rediscover the best of radical America. An essential part of that story is Wendell Berry. Few of us can live, or even aspire to, his kind of life. But nobody can risk ignoring him' Andrew Marr'Wendell Berry is the most important writer and thinker that you have (probably) never heard of. He is an American sage' -James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd's Life Wendell Berry is 'something of an anachronism'. He began his life as the old times and the last of the old-time people were dying out, and continues to this day in the old ways: a team of work horses and a pencil are his preferred working tools. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress, and in defence of the local landscapes that provide our cultural heritage, our history, our home.In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out to defend the land we live on. With grace and conviction, he shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy. The natural world will not withstand it.Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbours, and ourselves with respect and care. We must, as Berry urges, abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

Ranging from America's insatiable consumerism and household economies to literary subjects and America's attitude toward waste, here Berry gracefully navigates from one topic to the next. He speaks candidly about the ills plaguing America and the growing gap between people and the land. Despite the somber nature of these essays, Berry's voice and prose provide an underlying sense of faith and hope. He frames his reflections with poetic responsibility, standing up as a firm believer in the power of the human race not only to fix its past mistakes but to build a future that will provide a better life for all.

The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry gathers one hundred poems written between 1957 and 1996. Chosen by the author, these pieces have been selected from each of nine previously published collections. The rich work in this volume reflects the development of Berry's poetic sensibility over four decades. Focusing on themes that have occupied his work for years-land and nature, family and community, tradition as the groundwork for life and culture-The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry celebrates the broad range of this vital and transforming poet.

'"For more than sixty years, Wendell Berry has invited readers to Port William, Kentucky, a fictional setting that rivals Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, as the most richly imagined place in American literature. Library of America presents Berry's career-spanning masterpiece of storytelling for the first time as a single chronological narrative. This second volume gathers twenty-three stories and two novels that chronicle the lives of the Port William Membership from 1945 to 1978"--

"A companion to his beloved volume This Day and Wendell Berry's first new poetry collection since 2016, this new selection of Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials"--

In a culture that prizes keeping one¿s options open, making commitments offers something more valuable.The consumerism and instant gratification of ¿liquid modernity¿ feed a general reluctance to make commitments, a refusal to be pinned down for the long term. Consider the decline of three forms of commitment that involve giving up options: marriage, military service, and monastic life.Yet increasing numbers of people question whether unprecedented freedom might be leading to less flourishing, not more. They are dissatisfied with an atomized way of life that offers endless choices of goods, services, and experiences but undermines ties of solidarity and mutuality. They yearn for more heroic virtues, more sacrificial commitments, more comprehensive visions of the individual and common good.It turns out that the American Founders were right: the Creator did endow us with an unalienable right of liberty. But he has endowed us with something else as well, a gift that is equally unalienable: desire for unreserved commitment of all we have and are. Our liberty is given us so that we in turn can freely dedicate ourselves to something greater. Ultimately, to take a leap of commitment, even without knowing where one will land, is the way to a happiness worth everything.On this theme:- Lydia S. Dugdale asks what happened to the Hippocratic Oath in modern medicine.- Caitrin Keiper looks at competing vows in Victor Hugös Les Misérables. - Kelsey Osgood, an Orthodox Jew, asks why lifestyle discipline is admired in sports but not religion.- Wendell Berry says being on the side of love does not allow one to have enemies. - Phil Christman spoofs the New York Times Vows column.- Andreas Knapp tells why he chose poverty.- Norann Voll recounts the places a vow of obedience took her.- Carino Hodder says chastity is for everyone, not just nuns.- Dori Moody revisits her grandparents¿ broken but faithful marriage.- Randall Gauger, a Bruderhof pastor, finds that lifelong vows make faithfulness possible.- King-Ho Leung looks at vows, oaths, promises, and covenants in the Bible.Also in the issue: - A young Black pastor reads Clarence Jordan today.- Activists discuss the pro-life movement after Roe and Dobbs.- Children learn from King Arthur, Robin Hood, and the occasional cowboy.- Original poetry by Ned Balbo- Reviews of Montgomery and Biklé¿s What Your Food Ate, Mohsin Hamid¿s The Last White Man, and Bonnie Kristian¿s Untrustworthy- A profile of Sadhu Sundar SinghPlough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

The most comprehensive―and only author-authorized―Wendell Berry reader, "America's greatest philosopher on sustainable life and living" (Chicago Tribune).In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his fifty-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities.The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work. These are essays written in defiance of the false call to progress and in defense of local landscapes, essays that celebrate our cultural heritage, our history, and our home.With grace and conviction, Wendell Berry shows that we simply cannot afford to succumb to the mass-produced madness that drives our global economy―the natural world will not allow it.Yet he also shares with us a vision of consolation and of hope. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can and must begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care. As Berry urges, we must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.

Library of America inaugurates its edition of the complete fiction of one of America's most beloved living writersFor more than fifty years, in eight novels and fortytwo short stories, Wendell Berry (b. 1934) has created an indelible portrait of rural America through the lens of Port William, Kentucky, one of the most fully imagined places in American literature. Taken together, these novels and stories form a masterwork of American prose: straightforward, spare, and lyrical. Now, for the first time, in an edition prepared in consultation with the author, Library of America is presenting the complete story of Port William in the order of narrative chronology. This first volume, which spans from the Civil War to World War II, gathers the novels Nathan Coulter (1960, revised 1985), A Place on Earth (1967, revised 1983), A World Lost (1996), and Andy Catlett: Early Travels (2006), along with twenty-three short stories, among them such favorites as "Watch With Me," "Thicker than Liquor," and "A Desirable Woman." It also features a newly researched chronology of Berry's life and career, a map and a Port William Membership family tree, and helpful notes.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Thirteen new stories of the Port William membership spanning the decades from World War II to the present momentFor those readers of his poetry and inspired by his increasingly vital work as advocate for rational land use and the right-size life, these stories of Wendell Berry's offer entry into the fictional place of value and beauty that is Port William, Kentucky. Berry has said it's taken a lifetime for him to learn to write like an old man, and that's what we have here, stories told with grace and ease and majesty. Wendell Berry is one of our greatest living American authors, writing with the wisdom of maturity and the incandescence that comes of love.These thirteen new works explore the memory and imagination of Andy Catlett, one of the well-loved central characters of the Port William saga. From 1932 to 2021, these stories span the length of Andy’s life, from before the outbreak of the Second World War to the threatened end of rural life in America.

In "Life Is a Miracle", the devotion of science to the quantitative and reductionist world is measured against the mysterious, qualitative suggestions of religion and art. Berry sees life as the collision of these separate forces, but without all three in the mix people are left at sea in the world.

A brief meditation on the role of technology in his own life and how it has changed the landscape of the United States from "America's greatest philosopher on sustainable life and living" (Chicago Tribune)."A number of people, by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones."Wendell Berry first challenged the idea that our advanced technological age is a good thing when he penned "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" in the late 1980s for Harper's Magazine, galvanizing a critical reaction eclipsing any the magazine had seen before. He followed by responding with "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine." Both essays are collected in one short volume for the first time.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement.From the ravages of the global economy to the great pleasures of growing a garden, Wendell Berry's powerful essays represent a heartfelt call for humankind to mend our broken relationship with the earth, and with each other.Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

First published in A Continuous Harmony in 1972, "Think Little" is cultural critic and agrarian Berry at his best: prescient about the dire environmental consequences of people's mentality of greed and exploitation, yet hopeful that they will recognize war and oppression and pollution not as separate issues, but aspects of the same.

The second volume of the Library of America's definitive two-volume selection of the nonfiction writings of our greatest living advocate for sustainable culture.Writing with elegance and clarity, Wendell Berry is a compassionate and compelling voice for our time of political and cultural distrust and division, whether expounding the joys and wisdom of nonindustrial agriculture, relishing the pleasure of eating food produced locally by people you know, or giving voice to a righteous contempt for hollow innovation. He is our most important writer on the cultural crisis posed by industrialization and mass consumerism, and the vital role of rural, sustainable farming in preserving the planet as well as our national character. Now, in celebration of Berry's extraordinary six-decade-long career, Library of America presents a two-volume selection of his nonfiction writings prepared in close consultation with the author. In this second volume, forty-four essays from ten works turn to issues of political and social debate--big government, science and religion, and the meaning of citizenship following the tragedy of 9/11. Also included is his Jefferson Lecture to the National Endowment for the Humanities, "It All Turns on Affection" (2012). Berry's essays remain timely, even urgent today, and will resonate with anyone interested in our relationship to the natural world and especially with a younger, politically engaged generation invested in the future welfare of the planet.INCLUDES: Life is a Miracle AND SELECTIONS FROM Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community Another Turn of the Crank Citizenship Papers The Way of Ignorance What Matters? Imagination in Place It All Turns on Affection Our Only World The Art of Loading BrushLIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

"e;The Art of Loading Brush is singular in Berry's corpus."e; -The Paris ReviewWendell Berry's profound critique of American culture has entered its sixth decade, and in this gathering he reaches with deep devotion toward a long view of agrarian philosophy. The Art of Loading Brush is an energetic mix of essays, stories, and a poem, which explore agrarian ideals as they present themselves historically and as they might apply to our work today. Filled with insights and new revelations from a mind thorough in its considerations and careful in its presentations, The Art of Loading Brush is a necessary and timely collection.

Over the years, Wendell Berry has sought to understand and confront the financial structure of modern society and the impact of developing late capitalism on American culture. There is perhaps no more demanding or important critique available to contemporary citizens than Berrys writings just as there is no vocabulary more given to obfuscation than that of economics as practiced by professionals and academics. Berry has called upon us to return to the basics. He has traced how the clarity of our economic approach has eroded over time, as the financial asylum was overtaken by the inmates, and citizens were turned from consumers entertained and distracted to victims, threatened by a future of despair and disillusion.For this collection, Berry offers essays from over the last 25 years, alongside new essays about the recent economic collapse, including Money Versus Goods and Faustian Economics, treatises of great alarm and courage. He offers advice and perspective that should be heeded by all concerned as our society attempts to steer from its present chaos and recession to a future of hope and opportunity. With urgency and clarity, Berry asks us to look toward a true sustainable commonwealth, grounded in realistic Jeffersonian principles applied to our present day.

When he accepted the invitation to deliver The Jefferson Lecture—our nation’s highest honor for distinguished intellectual achievement—Wendell Berry decided to take on the obligation of thinking again about the problems that have engaged him throughout his long career. He wanted a fresh start, not only in looking at the groundwork of the problems facing our nation and the earth itself, but in gaining hope from some examples of repair and healing even in these times of Late Capitalism and its destructive contagions. As a poet and writer he understood already that much can be gleaned from looking at the vocabulary of these problems themselves and how we describe them. And he settled on “affection” as a method of engagement and solution. The result is the greatest speech he has delivered in his six decades of public life. It All Turns on Affection will take its place alongside The Unsettling of America and The Gift of Good Land as major testaments to the power and clarity of his contribution to American thought.We have taken this opportunity to include a small handful of other recent essays and a wonderful conversation between Mr. Berry, his wife Tanya Berry, and the head of the National Endowment of the Humanities Jim Leech, which took place just after the award was announced. The result offers a wonderful continuation of the long conversation Berry has had with his readers over many years and as well as a fine introduction to his life and work.

Wendell Berry proposes, and earnestly hopes, that people will learn once more to care for their local communities, and so begin a restoration that might spread over our entire nation and beyond. The renewed development of local economies would help preserve rural diversity despite the burgeoning global economy that threatens to homogenize and compromise communities all over the world.From modern health care to the practice of forestry, from local focus to national resolve, Berry argues, there can never be a separation between global ecosystems and human communitiesthe two are intricately connected, and the health and survival of one depends upon the other.Provocative, intimate, and thoughtful, Another Turn of the Crank reaches to the heart of Berrys concern and vision for the future, for America and for the world.

An urgent, visionary, and heartfelt collection of essays focused on recovering deeper, time–honored values against the ravages of modern society.In six elegant, linked literary essays, Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever–widening cleft between the words and their referents mirrors the increasing isolation of individuals and their communities from the land. “This skillfully conceived book is one of the strongest contemporary arguments for literary tradition: a challenging credo, un–glib, calmly assured, clearly illuminating—and required reading for those seriously interested in the interplay between literature, ethics, and morality.” —Kirkus Reviews “[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” —Publishers Weekly

For more than fifty years, Wendell Berry has been telling us stories about Port William, a mythical town on the banks of the Kentucky River, populated over the years by a cast of unforgettable characters living in a single place over a long time. In this new collection, the author’s first piece of new fiction since the publication of Andy Catlett in 2006, the stories date’s range from 1864, when Rebecca Dawe finds herself in her own reflection at the end of the Civil War, to one from 1991 when Grover Gibbs’ widow, Beulah, attends the auction as her home place is offered for sale.It feels as if the entire membership, all the Catletts, Burley Coulter, Elton Penn, the Rowanberrys, Laura Milby, the preacher’s wife, Kate Helen Branch, Andy’s dog, Mike, nearly everyone returns with a story or two, to fill in the gaps in this long tale. Those just now joining the Membership will be charmed. Those who’ve attended before will be enriched.The story of the community of Port William is one of the great works in American literature. Published in the author’s 78th year, this collection, the tenth volume in the series, is the perfect occasion to celebrate his huge achievement.

Unfortunately, on occasions too frequent and destructive to enumerate, the teachings of Christ have been either ignored or distorted by the very people calling themselves Christian. Whether directed towards social intolerance or attitudes of warlike aggression, these right–wing citizens have claimed a power of influence that far exceeds their numbers. Blessed Are the Peacemakers collects the sayings of Jesus, selected by Wendell Berry, who contributes an essay of introduction. This is a book of inspiration and prayerful compassion, a ringing call to action at a time when our country and the world it once led stand at a dangerous crossroads.