Watch With Me, Wendell Berry
Watch With Me, Wendell Berry
List: $15.99 | Sale: $11.20
Club: $7.99

Watch With Me
and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch

Author: Wendell Berry

Narrator: Lyle Blaker

Unabridged: 4 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/04/2024


Synopsis

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 is huge, outsized, in the tradition of the mythic. The three-hundred-pound farmer, personally imposing and unkempt, is also the most graceful of presences, reserved and gallant toward his tiny wife, the ninety-pound schoolteacher.

Their contrasts are humorous, of course, and recall the tall tales of rural Americana. In the novella Watch with Me, we are given a story of such depth, breadth, and importance it earns being listed as one of the most important short stories written in the American language during the twentieth century.

About Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among others. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tamara on March 20, 2017

Whenever I visit the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky with Berry as my storytelling guide, something deep inside me stretches out and relaxes. Even though his characters are not shallow, meeting their days with their own set of complexities, I feel like I can relax that truth will be told in......more

Goodreads review by Longfellow on May 11, 2011

The New York Times writes that Berry’s stories “are filled with gentle humor,” and I’d like to expand on this. When Berry exposes the failures or faults of his characters, he does so not at the expense of their humanity but in honor and respect for it. In this way we are amused but appreciative, not......more

Goodreads review by Isabella on March 11, 2023

This volume was the first of Wendell Berry's fiction that I loved, which either (a) confirms my suspicion that he is a much finer writer in brief than at length or (b) highlights my preference for the brief (his short stories and essays) over the full-length (his novels and The Unsettling of America......more

Goodreads review by Bob on November 16, 2021

Summary: Six short stories and the title novella centered around the Port William resident, Tol Proudfoot and his wife, Miss Minnie and their life on a rural farm, part of the membership of a rural community. This one had me at the title, both for its length, and the “yet-remembered” part. For Ptolem......more

Goodreads review by Star on March 07, 2025

An enjoyable read for sure! It was nice to slow down and read the sweet short stories in this book. The characters were pleasant. I can see someone being bored but it was actually really refreshing to have this book amongst my other readings.......more