Synopses & Reviews
...it was touching to discover that this lonely spot was not without its pilgrims.The story of an endearing, unlikely friendship set against the backdrop of a remote and beautiful Maine coastal town, The Country of Pointed Firs is one of Sarah Orne Jewett's most loved works, and it quickly earned her a reputation as a talented writer upon its publication. Praised by Alice Brown for its "idyllic atmosphere of country life," Jewett's moving novel shows her intimate understanding of New England and its unique inhabitants, whose prickly exteriors often concealed a warm and loyal nature.
Willa Cather (My Antonia, Death of The Archbishop) remarked that The Country of The Pointed Firs was one of three American books destined for imortality, placing it beside Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The Art of The Novella Series
Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.
Synopsis
This collection of stories is based on the personal experiences of Sarah Jewett as she grew up in rural Maine and traveled with her doctor father. The closely-knit sketches of a small fishing village in Maine seaport town in the 1890's are narrated by a summer resident. In the title story first published in 1886, a writer retreats to spend a quiet summer in a remote seaport, where she discovers a strong and cohesive community even as the town faces economic decline
About the Author
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.