From the jacket flap:

"Wendell Berry has constructed an almost perfect fiction, a sublime meditation on how irrevocable loss is redeemed through a renewed sense of kinship with the land and the past." The Washington Post

For the last five decades, Wendell Berry has imagined into being the lives of five generations of people living in the small country town of Port William, Kentucky. Several extended families have accumulated, more than one hundred years have passed, and Port William has taken its firm place in the landscape of American literature, alongside Winesburg, Ohio, Paterson, New Jersey, and Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. No better transcription of the American dream, as it unfolds day-to-day in the lives of the people of this imaginary heartland, has been accomplished by an American writer.

That Distant Land collects twenty-three stories, interlinked with each other and with the six 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. And we are pleased to include for the first time a map of Port William and its surroundings along with a genealogy. The range of this book is extraordinary -- it offers rest for the weary, hope for the beleaguered, and strength for everyone else.

"The good and simple truth to which each of Berry's stories testifies is that its author observes people carefully, understands them precisely, and cares about them deeply; bombast, pretension, and narcissism are alien to him." New Criterion

Jacket design by David Bullen. Jacket art: Street Scene by Harlan Hubbard.

Map and genealogy designed by Molly O'Halloran. Genealogy prepared by David McCowen. 440 pages

Contents:

The Hurt Man (1888)
Don't Send a Boy to Do a Man's Work (1891)
A Consent (1908)
Pray Without Ceasing (1912)
Watch With Me (1916)
A Half-Pint of Old Darling (1920)
The Lost Bet (1929)
Thicker than Liquor (1930)
Nearly to the Fair (1932)
The Solemn Boy (1934)
A Jonquil for Mary Penn (1940)
Turn Back the Bed (1941)
Making It Home (1945)
Where Did They Go? (1947)
The Discovery of Kentucky (1952)
It Wasn't Me (1953)
The Boundary (1965)
That Distant Land (1965)
A Friend of Mine (1967)
The Wild Birds (1967)
Are You Alright? (1973)
Fidelity (1977)
The Inheritors (1986)

Links:

Washington Times review of That Distant Land

Wendell Berry's Yoknapatawpha: A Review of That Distant Land

An overview of "Fidelity" from a medical perspective

"Lest We Forget" an excerpt from "Making It Home" from Fidelity