THE ART OF LOADING BRUSH
New Agrarian Writings
1. The Presence of Nature in the Natural World
2. The Thoughts of Limits in a Prodigal Age
3. The Future (Probably) Is Coming: A Letter to Charlie Sing
4. A Long Ancestry
5. The Branch Way of Doing
6. The Order of Loving care [How His Mind Was Made III]
7. The Art of Loading Brush
Marketing
WENDELL BERRY, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. He is also a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Wendell lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.
Praise for The Art of Loading Brush
"In Berry’s new book, The Art of Loading Brush, he is a frustrated
advocate, speaking out against local wastefulness and distant
idealism; he is a gentle friend, asserting as he always has, the
hope possible in caring for the world, and your specific place in
it . . . The Art of Loading Brush is singular in Berry’s corpus."
—The Paris Review
"Berry's essays, continuing arguments begun in The Unsettling of
America 40 years ago, will be familiar to longtime readers,
blending his farm work with his interests in literature old and new
. . . Vintage Berry sure to please and instruct his many admirers."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"About everything he loves and everything he regrets he has never
written better." —Booklist (starred review)
"Berry has faithfully cultivated his given life within the limits
of his marginal place in rural Kentucky, and . . . in the essays,
stories, and single poem collected in his latest book, he distills
his life’s varied work into a coherent sense. And like Kentucky
bourbon, it is a complex, mature sense, flavored by the fields and
forests of his place." —Englewood Review of Books
"The cumulative force of these lyrical essays takes the reader’s
breath away, as if we have relearned something essential that
contradicts the world all around us . . . Here is a man deeply
rooted, wisely aware, offering a manifesto of weighty moral
passion. He exposes the counterfeit quality of our dominant life
and summons us to know and live differently." —The Christian
Century
Praise for A Small Porch
"[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
"Berry’s craftsmanship remains impeccable. Few other poets have
such chaste and precise diction or manage line and stanza with such
unaffected serenity." —Booklist
"Thoreau would be gratified . . . Here are Sabbath Poems that
praise the given life."—Lexington Herald-Leader
"[Berry’s poems] shine with a gentle wisdom of a craftsman who has
thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonder of
life." —The Christian Science Monitor
"Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us
always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an
active and aware participation in the arts of life, be they those
of composing a poem, preparing a hill for planting, raising a
family, working for the good of oneself and one’s neighbors,
loving." —The Bloomsbury Review
Praise for Life is Miracle: An Essay Against Modern
Superstitions
"[A] scathing assessment…Berry shows that Wilson’s much-celebrated,
controversial pleas in Consilience to unify all branches of
knowledge is nothing more than a fatuous subordination of religion,
art, and everything else that is good to science…Berry is one of
the most perceptive critics of American society writing today."
—Washington Post Book World
"I am tempted to say he understands [Consilience] better than
Wilson himself…A new emancipation proclamation in which he speaks
again and again about how to defy the tyranny of scientific
materialism." —Christian Science Monitor
"Berry takes a wrecking ball to E. O. Wilson’s Consilience,
reducing its smug assumptions regarding the fusion of science, art,
and religion to so much rubble." —Kirkus
Praise for It All Turns on Affection
"These powerful, challenging essays show why Berry’s vision of a
sustainable, human-scaled society has proven so influential."
—Publishers Weekly
Praise for Imagination in Place
"Berry’s latest collection of essays is the reminiscence of a
literary life. It is a book that acknowledges a lifetime of
intellectual influences, and in doing so, positions Berry more
squarely as a cornerstone of American literature… a necessary book.
Here, Berry’s place as the ‘grandfather of slow food’ or the
‘prophet of rural living’ is not questioned. This book ensures we
understand the depth and breadth of Berry’s art." —San Francisco
Chronicle
"[A] stellar collection… Berry turns over well-tilled, ever-fertile
ground in Imagination in Place. His ideas flow beyond the channels
of agrarian enthusiasm. Foodies, architects, transportation
engineers, and other writers are adopting and adapting his
concepts, perhaps leading to what he envisions will one day be ‘an
authentic settlement of our country.’" —The Oregonian
"For those who’ve already come to admire Berry’s moral clarity and
closely argued critiques of contemporary society, Imagination in
Place is a welcome chance to continue the conversation." —Christian
Science Monitor
Praise for Home Economics: Fourteen Essays
"Wherever we live, however we do so, we desperately need a prophet
of responsibility; and although the days of the prophets seem past
to many of us, Berry may be the closest to one we have. But,
fortunately, he is also a poet of responsibility. He makes one
believe that the good life may not only be harder than what we’re
used to but sweeter as well." —New York Review of Books
Praise for The Hidden Wound
"A profound, passionate, crucial piece of writing… Few readers, and
I think, no writers will be able to read it without a small pulse
of triumph at the temples: the strange, almost communal sense of
triumph one feels when someone has written truly well… The
statement it makes is intricate and beautiful, sad but strong."
—Washington Post
"The brunt of the book is to wake us up, page after page, from
stupidity. ‘It is a kind of death,’ Montaigne said, ‘to avoid the
pain of well doing, or trouble of well living.’ Wendell Berry makes
that observation rip the air like an alarm clock." —Guy Davenport,
author of The Death of Picasso
"Berry has produced one of the most humane, honest, liberating
works of our time. It is a beautiful book. More than that, it has
become at one stroke an essential book. Every American who can read
at all should read it." —Village Voice
"One of the most impressive aspects of Berry’s book is the
authentic simplicity of his style, the directness with which that
style can accommodate Tolstoy, Malcolm X, work songs, anecdotes,
speculation, and polemic indignation… The strength of this book is
its connecting America’s two major problems: the exploiting of men
and land; it deserves as wide an audience as possible." —Louisville
Courier-Journal
"One of the most touching and true personal testaments concerned
with our country’s racial dilemma." —Publishers Weekly
Praise for The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and
Agricultural
"These books [Recollected Essays and The Gift of Good Land] are the
kind that you spend months with, hate to give up, and plan to
return to soon and often. There is much pure pleasure in them, both
in the spare and crafted eloquence of their prose, and in the
breadth and depth of their content. They’re reference works of the
body and soul…" —Washington Post Book World
"These pieces are angry, urgent, courageous, joyous and
reaffirming." —Philadelphia Inquirer
Praise for Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry
and Gary Snyder
"Candid, introspective and often deeply philosophical, these
letters offer intimate glimpses into the lives and minds of two
influential contemporary writers." —Kirkus
"[…]distills the decades-long flourishing of a remarkable
friendship and documents the careers of two important living
American writers, natural philosophers, and conservationists."
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review
"[T]he letters are packed with gems…They’re valuable for
ecologists, students and teachers of contemporary American
literature and for those of us eager to know how these two distant
neighbors networked, negotiated and remained friends." —San
Francisco Chronicle
"In Distant Neighbors, both Berry and Snyder come across as honest
and open-hearted explorers. There is an overall sense that they
possess a deep and questing wisdom, hard earned through land work,
travel, writing, and spiritual exploration. There is no rushing, no
hectoring, and no grand gestures between these two, just an
ever-deepening inquiry into what makes a good life and how to live
it, even in the depths of the machine age." —Orion Magazine
"Over and over in these pages the authors rise up to the big,
mythical arenas of human existence, then float back down to the
simple comforts of the mundane. Such is the feast that feeds them.
And as a reader of these letters, it’s hard not to feel terribly
fortunate to be seated at the table." —Los Angeles Review of
Books
"The sense of generosity and gratitude that pervades these letters
is another shared commitment, and it is a particularly important
place where their religious sensibilities overlap. As poets and
essayists…both writers have advocated a stance of gratitude toward
the world, a way of seeing it as a gift." —Commonweal
"Distant Neighbors showcases these two great American
poet-philosophers at most thoughtful and least guarded. Decades of
correspondence drill down through the layers of their concerns—land
use, economics, farming, wild nature, the life of the spirit,
modernity itself—as they struggle to live within a culture tearing
itself up by its roots." —The New Statesman
"This selection of letters offers an unforgettable glimpse of the
difficulties and fulfillment of such work, and of a most remarkable
friendship." —Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment
"Berry and Snyder offer us a model of convivial masculinity, an
exemplary relationship between two men who are grounded in their
own practical lives and enjoy reaching out in friendship while
being willing to disagree heartily." —Resurgence & Ecologist
Praise for A Continuous Harmony
"This book is broad and leisurely and important. Something like the
river itself on which Wendell Berry lives. It is full of wide and
flowing thoughts and one thing leads to another in the manner that
nature intended—or used to. The language ranges from the grave and
beautiful to the sharp and specific, depending on the need to
express the vast variety of subjects he presents." —The Nation
Praise for Citizenship Papers
"Berry says that these recent essays mostly say again what he has
said before. His faithful readers may think he hasn’t, however,
said any of it better before." —Booklist Starred Review
"His refusal to abandon the local for the global, to sacrifice
neighborliness, community integrity, and economic diversity for
access to Wal-Mart, has never seemed more appealing, nor his
questions of personal accountability more powerful." —Kirkus
"The courage of a book, it has been said, is that it looks away
from nothing. Here is a brave book." —Charlotte Observer
Praise for Blessed Are the Peacemakers
"Berry restates an old message as beautifully as he has stated
anything in his long, distinguished career." —Booklist
Praise for The Art of the Commonplace
"Wendell Berry speaks as well as anyone of what is genuine, what is
creative, what is ennobling." —Washington Post
"[Berry’s words] shine with the gentle wisdom of a craftsman who
has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and wonders of
life." —Christian Science Monitor
Praise for Another Turn of the Crank: Essays
"Berry is a philosopher, poet, novelist and an essayist in the
tradition of Emerson and Thoreau . . . like Thoreau, he marches to
a different drummer, a drummer we would do well to be aware of, if
not to march to." —San Francisco Chronicle
"The best serious essayist now at work in the United States."
—Edward Abbey, author of Hayduke Lives
"Berry is a philosopher, poet, novelist, and an essayist in the
tradition of Emerson and Thoreau… like Thoreau, he marches to a
different drummer, a drummer we would do well to be aware of." —San
Francisco Chronicle
"Read [Berry] with pencil in hand, make notes and hope that somehow
our country and the world will soon come to see the truth that is
told here." —New York Times
"The rarest (and highest) of literary classes consist of that small
group of authors who are absolutely inimitable… One of the
half-dozen living American authors who belongs in this class is
Wendell Berry." —Los Angeles Times
"Berry is the prophetic American voice of our day." —Christian
Science Monitor
"A Kentucky farmer and writer, and perhaps the great moral essayist
of our day, Berry has produced one of his shortest but also most
powerful volumes." —New York Review of Books
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