The Country Of Pointed Firs

Description

An endearing, unlikely friendship set against the backdrop of a beautiful Maine coastal town provides the setting for what is considered to be Sarah Orne Jewett's finest work. Loosely structured, the narrative is unified through both setting and theme and can be read as a study of the effects of isolation and the hardships encountered in the face of decaying industry. The moving prose invites the reader into an intimate portrait of a New England town and its characterful inhabitants whose prickly exteriors often conceal a warm and loyal nature.

Sarah Orne Jewett grew up in South Berwick, Maine, near the border of New Hampshire, in Jewett's day a declining New England seaport, where she set most of her fiction.

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read." -Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer "Small wonders." -Time Out London "[F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works." -Adam Begley, The New York Observer "I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series." -The New Yorker "The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed-tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are." -KQED (NPR San Francisco) "Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package." -The Wall Street Journal