A Rainbow

by Wendell Berry, Wesley Bates (Illustrator)

A story from Port William.
The wood engravings are by Wesley Bates.

Genres: Fiction

32 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2022

About the author

Wendell Berry was a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land (1981) and The Unsettling of America (1977). His attention to the culture and economy of rural communities is also found in the novels and stories of Port William, such as A Place on Earth (1967), Jayber Crow (2000), and That Distant Land (2004).

Berry was an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of the National Humanities Medal and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He was also a 2013 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, from 2014 to his death, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Berry was named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award. On January 28, 2015, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.

abridged from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Kendall Fontenot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick and lovely read in dear memory of Wendell Berry, who passed just the other day—a truly great thinker, writer, conservationist, and farmer.

“…we were moved by an old feeling in the bones, an old delight in the places of this world that we needed to live in, work in, know the light and the weather in, to the end of our days. The sympathy, the unanimity, that passed among us remains with me in their absence, and it will remain with me, I pray, as a consolation and a light as long as I am here.”

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a long-time Wendell Berry fan so he's probably not going to write much I won't like. A Rainbow is another great Port William story. If you're a Wendell Berry reader, you know what to expect and won't be disappointed. Like most of his writing this story has that easy pace where there's nothing shocking and yet the truth of the world is revealed. The bonus to this edition is the incredible engravings - Larkspur Press makes the most beautiful books.