The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry
This collection, edited by Paul Kingsnorth, gathers essays Wendell Berry has written over half a century about farming, family, ecology, and the American countryside. Berry writes as a working farmer in Kentucky and as a critic of an economy that treats land, labor, and community as expendable. The essays move between memoir, cultural criticism, and quiet moral argument, taking aim at industrial agriculture, cheap energy, and the myth of endless progress. Berry's language is plain and slow, but the questions he asks about what a good life owes to place and neighbor are radical. The book offers a coherent introduction to one of America's most stubbornly local writers.
What you might want to know about The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A career-spanning selection of Wendell Berry's essays on land, community, work, and the costs of modern speed.
Yes. Newport has written about Wendell Berry on his blog and recommended this collection as an important influence on his thinking about slow productivity, craft, and the ethics of attention.
No. Berry writes for a general reader and uses farming as a lens on broader questions about work, community, and technology.
The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry was written by Wendell Berry, published in 2018 by Counterpoint.
The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
