In the latest installment in Wendell Berry's long story about the citizens of Port William, Hannah Coulter sorts through her memories. Her first husband, Virgil, was declared "missing in action" shortly after the Battle of the Bulge; and after she married Nathan Coulter, about all he could tell Hannah about the Battle of Okinawa was "Ignorant boys, killing each other." The community was stunned and diminished by the war, with some of its sons lost...

At the age of 60, a Kentucky man decides to find out why half a century earlier his favorite uncle was shot, a crime for which the killer spent only two years in jail. The man was nine years old when the incident occurred and nobody would give him a reason.

That Distant Land collects twenty-three stories, interlinked with each other and with the other published 'Port William' novels. The stories, arranged in their fictional chronology (from 1888 to almost the present day), become one sustained work, a new novel that spans the entire life and time involved. The range of this book is extraordinary: it offers rest for the weary, hope for the beleaguered, and strength for everyone else.

A collection of twenty short 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.

"At the age of eighty, Andy Catlett is preparing himself to join the whole Membership of Port William, which includes those alive as well as those departed who still seem vividly alive. As he looks back on his own life through thirteen stories that range from his earliest childhood memories to the present day, from 1945 to 2001, How It Went reveals Andy at his most loving and retrospective, coming to the end of his days surrounded by the love and...

In a small town in Kentucky, 92-year-old Jack Beechum, a farmer, moves slowly through his last day of life. Day dreaming in his rocking-chair, he recalls his love for his wife and long days working the earth.

This volume of six linked stories and the novella from which the book derives its title is set in Port William from 1908 to the Second World War. Here Wendell Berry introduces two of his more indelible and poignant characters, Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie, remarkable for the comic and affectionate range that, with the mastery of this consummate storyteller working at the height of his powers, here approaches the Shakespearean. Tol Proudfoot...