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Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honours include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story Brokeback Mountain, which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. She lives in Seattle
For the readership, this is a huge historical novel to immerse yourself in. A dramatic, violent, absorbing, long read for which you need to put aside serious time to devour. You will find it difficult to put down. Charting the lives of two families, the Sels and the Duquets from 1693 to 2013, it tells of the rape of the Canadian natural resources, namely timber and fur but predominantly timber. Hard men made fortunes with little regard for anything but power and wealth, certainly not for their workers’ lives or limbs. The first of the immigrant Sels married an Indian; their offspring are then trapped between two cultures. As you would expect, there is a huge number of characters for characters is what Proulx is all about. This is a truly impressive work detailing the destruction of the forests to the point of ecological disaster.
One of our Books of the Year 2016. July 2016 Book of the Month. For the readership, this is a huge historical novel to immerse yourself in. A dramatic, violent, absorbing, long read for which you need to put aside serious time to devour. You will find it difficult to put down. Charting the lives of two families, the Sels and the Duquets from 1693 to 2013, it tells of the rape of the Canadian natural resources, namely timber and fur but predominantly timber. Hard men made fortunes with little regard for anything but power and wealth, certainly not for their workers’ lives or limbs. The first of the immigrant Sels married an Indian; their offspring are then trapped between two cultures. As you would expect, there is a huge number of characters for characters is what Proulx is all about. This is a truly impressive work detailing the destruction of the forests to the point of ecological disaster.
This novel has become a modern classic and deservedly so. Telling the story of Quoyle, who on the death of his wife moves the farthest reaches of Newfoundland. Tear and laughter abound in this story of a man trying to piece his life back together in the harsh but beautiful backdrop of Newfoundland. If you have yet to discover the joys of this novel rush and buy your copy now. This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.
Pulitzer (the top American literary prize) prize-winning author of The Shipping News with a collection of short stories set in Wyoming. Every story is a stunner. Displaying wit, her knowledge of the West, of history, of ranching and farming, she outlines characters in a few strokes of robust language, folk who must use sheer will and courage to make it in such a tough territory. Her detail is meticulous, her prose lyrical and hard-hitting, her stories magical or bleak. In a word, they are brilliant.Comparison: Carol Shields, Thomas Eidson, Louise Erdrich.Similar this month: Douglas Coupland, Kate Atkinson.
May 2010 Good Housekeeping selection. On My Bookshelf by Nicci French...I have never met anyone who has read E Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News and not fallen in love with it. It has an odd cast of characters, awkward, bruised, unnoticed and failed. Without a drop of sentimentality, it is a miracle of storytelling.’ The Lovereading view... This novel has become a modern classic and deservedly so. Telling the story of Quoyle, who on the death of his wife moves the farthest reaches of Newfoundland. Tear and laughter abound in this story of a man trying to piece his life back together in the harsh but beautiful backdrop of Newfoundland. If you have yet to discover the joys of this novel rush and buy your copy now.
Annie Proulx's highly acclaimed, international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. One of the ten books - novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography - that make up our Matchbook Classics' series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist. Quoyle is a hapless, hopeless hack journalist living and working in New York. While weathering the storm that is his marriage of one-way love to his no-good wife Petal, disaster strikes and Petal is killed in a spectacular road accident. Set adrift on an aimless quest, Quoyle heads for the land of his forefathers - to the remote corners of far-flung Newfoundland. With his delinquent daughters Bunny and Sunshine in tow, Quoyle takes up the post of shipping news reporter, and finds himself part of an unfolding, exhilarating Atlantic drama. The Shipping News is an irresistible comedy of human life and possibility.
For the readership, this is a huge historical novel to immerse yourself in. A dramatic, violent, absorbing, long read for which you need to put aside serious time to devour. You will find it difficult to put down. Charting the lives of two families, the Sels and the Duquets from 1693 to 2013, it tells of the rape of the Canadian natural resources, namely timber and fur but predominantly timber. Hard men made fortunes with little regard for anything but power and wealth, certainly not for their workers’ lives or limbs. The first of the immigrant Sels married an Indian; their offspring are then trapped between two cultures. As you would expect, there is a huge number of characters for characters is what Proulx is all about. This is a truly impressive work detailing the destruction of the forests to the point of ecological disaster.
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARFrom Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world's forests.In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a "e;seigneur,"e; for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters - barkskins. Rene suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi'kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years - their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand, under stunningly brutal conditions; the revenge of rivals; accidents; pestilence; Indian attacks; and cultural annihilation. Over and over again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.Proulx's inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid - in their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hope - that we follow them with fierce attention. Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American writers, and Barkskins is her greatest novel, a magnificent marriage of history and imagination.
From Annie Proulxthe Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountaincomes her masterpiece, ten years in the writing: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about taming the wilderness, set over two centuries.In the late eighteenth century Rene Sel, an illiterate woodsman, makes his way from Northern France to New France to seek a living. Bound to a feudal lord, a seigneur, for three years in exchange for land, he suffers extraordinary hardship, always in awe of the forest he is charged with cleaning. Rene marries an Indian healer with children already, and they have more, mixing the blood of two cultures. Proulx tells the stories of the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of two lineages, the Sels and the Duquets, as well as the descendants of their allies and foes, as they travel back to Europe, to China, to New England, always in quest of a livelihood or fleeing stunningly brutal conditionsaccidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, the revenge of rivals. Proulxs inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vividin their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hopethat we follow them with fierce attention. Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable American writers of our time, and Barkskins is her Moby Dick.
One of our Books of the Year 2016. July 2016 Book of the Month. For the readership, this is a huge historical novel to immerse yourself in. A dramatic, violent, absorbing, long read for which you need to put aside serious time to devour. You will find it difficult to put down. Charting the lives of two families, the Sels and the Duquets from 1693 to 2013, it tells of the rape of the Canadian natural resources, namely timber and fur but predominantly timber. Hard men made fortunes with little regard for anything but power and wealth, certainly not for their workers’ lives or limbs. The first of the immigrant Sels married an Indian; their offspring are then trapped between two cultures. As you would expect, there is a huge number of characters for characters is what Proulx is all about. This is a truly impressive work detailing the destruction of the forests to the point of ecological disaster.
Annie Proulx, one of America's finest writers, invites us to share her experience in the building of her new home on a rich plot of untouched, unspoilt prairie and her pleasure in uncovering of the layers of American history locked beneath the topsoil. `Bird Cloud' is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and 400 foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She knew she had to purchase the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she would build on it - a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character - a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Proulx's first non-fiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of building that house - solar panels, a Japanese soak tub, a concrete floor, elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets - and an enthralling natural history and archeology of the region, inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians. It is also a family history, going back to nineteenth century Mississippi river boat captains and Canadian settlers, and an illuminating autobiography. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.
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Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man tryingto make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind -- his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panahandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms. Dollar finds himself in a Texas town called Woolybucket, whose idiosyncratic inhabitants have ridden out all manner of seismic shifts in panhandle country. These are tough men and women who witnessed first hand tornadoes, dust storms, and the demise of the great cattle ranches. Now it's feed lots, hog farms, and ever-expanding drylands. Dollar settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Caf, targets Ace and Tater Crouch's ranch for Global Pork, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old owners will hold on to their land, even though their children want no part of it. Robust, often bawdy, strikingly original and intimate, The Old Ace in the Hole tracks the vast waves of change that have shaped the American landscape and the character over the past century. In Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irresistible characters in contemporary fiction.
Part family history, part naturalists journaland her first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years Bird Cloud is Annie Proulxs vivid chronicle of building a house on a spectacularly beautiful piece of land in Wyoming. Idiosyncratic, original, and spectacularly vivid, Bird Cloud was conceived as a book about building a house and then became a family history, an archaeology of the Wyoming landscape, and as close to memoir as Annie Proulx will ever get. A half dozen years ago, Proulx fell in love with 600 acres being sold by The Nature Conservancy of Wyoming. Grazing land plunged down a 400-foot cliff to the North Platte River. The property was home to bald eagles, mountain lions, and cranes.Interspersed with tales of construction and the stunning wildlife at Bird Cloud is family history going back to a great-great grandfather who was a river boat captain in the west in the mid-nineteenth centurya kindred spirit, it seems, who met Lafayette, Audubon, and Mark Twain.Bird Cloud will be an opportunity for reviewers and listeners to see what Annie Proulx is made of, where she comes from, how her magnificent mind works, and why she writes so brilliantly.
The fantastic new collection of stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of `The Shipping News' and `Brokeback Mountain'. `Fine Just The Way It Is' marks Annie Proulx's return to the Wyoming of `Brokeback Mountain' and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. The stories are cast over centuries, and capture the voices and lives of the settlers this sagebrushed and weatherworn country has known, from the native Indian tribes to the modern day ranch owners and politicians, and their cowboy forebears. In `A Family Man', an old man nearing the end of his life unburdens himself of the weighty family secrets that were his father's unwelcome legacy. `Them Old Cowboy Songs' follows Archie and Rosie, a young pioneer couple, and their hardships in their attempt to homestead in the exposed wintry expanses of the prairie, and `Testimony of the Donkey' finds a young international couple, Marc and Caitlin, struggling with much more modern concerns, and confronting uncertainty as their relationship comes to its end. These are stories of desperation and hard times, often marked by an inescapable sadness, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes - confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty - with the more benign values of the new west. These are bold, elegant and memorable pieces, and once more confirm Annie Proulx as one of the most talented, unique short story writers in the language.
Created and edited by Pulitzer Prize wining author Annie Proulx, this frank, funny, richly textured portrait of legendary writer Robert F. Jones features 15 of his best stories, both fiction and non-fiction. The book also includes 17 wonderful tributes by some of America's greatest outdoor writers and a collection of Robert Jones' images by renowned photographer Bill Eppridge.
Returning to the territory of "e;Brokeback Mountain,"e; National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral collection of new stories. In Fine Just the Way It Is, she has expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate. Proulx's characters try to climb out of poverty and desperation but get cut down as if the land itself wanted their blood. Deeply sympathetic to the men and women fighting to survive in this harsh place, Proulx turns their lives into fiction with the power of myth -- and leaves the listener in awe. The winner of two O. Henry Prizes, Annie Proulx has been anthologized in every major collection of great American stories. Her bold, inimitable language, her exhilarating eye for detail and her dark sense of humor make this a profoundly compelling collection.
The fantastic new collection of stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of `The Shipping News' and `Brokeback Mountain'. `Fine Just The Way It Is' marks Annie Proulx's return to the Wyoming of `Brokeback Mountain' and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. The stories are cast over centuries, and capture the voices and lives of the settlers this sagebrushed and weatherworn country has known, from the native Indian tribes to the modern day ranch owners and politicians, and their cowboy forebears. In 'A Family Man', an old man nearing the end of his life unburdens himself of the weighty family secrets that were his father's unwelcome legacy. 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' follows Archie and Rosie, a young pioneer couple, and their hardships in their attempt to homestead in the exposed wintry expanses of the prairie, and 'Testimony of the Donkey' finds a young international couple, Marc and Caitlin, struggling with much more modern concerns, and confronting uncertainty as their relationship comes to its end. These are stories of desperation and hard times, often marked by an inescapable sadness, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes-confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty - with the more benign values of the new west. These are bold, elegant and memorable pieces, and once more confirm Annie Proulx as one of the most talented, unique short story writers in the language.
The film tie-in edition of the story by Annie Proulx, now a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Randy Quaid, Anne Hathaway and Heath Ledger.Winner of four BAFTAs 2006, including Best Film, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role, Best Screenplay - Adapted and the David Lean Award for DirectionWinner of four Golden Globe Awards 2005, including Best Screenplay, Best Motion Picture and Best DirectorWinner of the Golden Lion Award for Best Picture, 2005 Venice International Film FestivalJack Twist and Ennis del Mar live hard and lonely lives as ranch hands in the wild, unforgiving landscape of Wyoming. They are 'country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered and tough-spoken', glad to have found one another's company where none had been expected. But suddenly companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain: something not looked for, something deadly ...
WINNER OF THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL GOLDEN LION AWARD Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many, Brokeback Mountain is her masterpiece. Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheep herder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it. Brokeback Mountain was originally published in the New Yorker -- it won the National Magazine Award and was included in the O. Henry Stories 1998. In gorgeous and haunting prose Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent intolerance.
The inspiration behind `Life of Pi' director Ang Lee's `Brokeback Mountain' is one of the short stories to be found in this haunting collection of Wyoming tales. `Brokeback Mountain' is set in the beautiful, wild landscape of Wyoming where cowboys live as they have done for generations. Hard, lonely lives in unforgiving country. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are two ranch hands, glad to have found each other's company where none had been expected. But companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain, something not looked for - an intimacy neither can forget. `Brokeback Mountain' was made into an Academy Award-winning film by Ang Lee, and starred Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway.
Pulitzer (the top American literary prize) prize-winning author of The Shipping News with a collection of short stories set in Wyoming. Every story is a stunner. Displaying wit, her knowledge of the West, of history, of ranching and farming, she outlines characters in a few strokes of robust language, folk who must use sheer will and courage to make it in such a tough territory. Her detail is meticulous, her prose lyrical and hard-hitting, her stories magical or bleak. In a word, they are brilliant.Comparison: Carol Shields, Thomas Eidson, Louise Erdrich.Similar this month: Douglas Coupland, Kate Atkinson.
A brilliant novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Proulx, author of `The Shipping News' and `Brokeback Mountain'. `That Old Ace in the Hole' is a richly textured story of one man's struggle to make good in the inhospitable ranch country of the Texas panhandle, told with razor-sharp wit and a masterly sense of place. Some folks in the Texas panhandle do not like hog farms. But Bob Dollar, the newly hired hog site scout for Global Pork Rind, intends to do his job. Bob must contend with tough men and women like ancient Freda Beautyrooms, who controls a ranch he covets, and Ace Crouch, the windmiller who defies the hog farms. As Bob settles in at La Von Fronk's bunkhouse and lends a hand at Cy Frease's Old Dog Cafe, he is forced to question everything.
Discover the pleasures of making and drinking cider. From choosing the right apples through reaping the liquid rewards of a successful pressing, this classic guide has you covered. With detailed drawings of cider-making equipment, methods, and set-up, even a novice juicer will enjoy sweet and spicy gallons in no time. Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols provide insightful, time-tested advice enlivened by a smattering of historical anecdotes. Whether you like your cider sweet or hard, you're sure to find a recipe that satisfies.
This is story of Loyal Blood, a man who spends a lifetime on the run from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman. The odyssey begins on a freezing Vermont hillside in 1944 and propels Blood across the American West for forty years. Denied love and unable to settle, he lives a hundred different lives: mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils, trapping, prospecting for uranium and ranching. His only contact with his past is through a series of postcards he sends home - not realising that in his absence disaster has befallen his family, and their deep-rooted connection with the land has been severed with devastating consequences... `Postcards' was Annie Proulx's first novel, which received huge acclaim and marked the launch of an outstanding literary career. Her works include short story collections `Bad Dirt', `Close Range' (featuring `Brokeback Mountain') and novels such as `The Shipping News' and `Accordion Crimes'.
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man tryingto make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind -- his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panahandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms. Dollar finds himself in a Texas town called Woolybucket, whose idiosyncratic inhabitants have ridden out all manner of seismic shifts in panhandle country. These are tough men and women who witnessed first hand tornadoes, dust storms, and the demise of the great cattle ranches. Now it's feed lots, hog farms, and ever-expanding drylands. Dollar settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Caf, targets Ace and Tater Crouch's ranch for Global Pork, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old owners will hold on to their land, even though their children want no part of it. Robust, often bawdy, strikingly original and intimate, The Old Ace in the Hole tracks the vast waves of change that have shaped the American landscape and the character over the past century. In Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irresistible characters in contemporary fiction.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulxs The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family.Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips, is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyles Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the familys unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and its easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents). As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumphin the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lovers knot.
A breathtaking collection of unabridged stories from the Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of The Shipping News and Accordion CrimesAnnie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love.Close Range features stories of desperation, hard times, and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes -- confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty -- with the more benign values of the new west.Stories in Close Range have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.
The third novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of `The Shipping News', `Accordion Crimes' spans generations, continents and a century and confirms the hallucinatory power of Proulx's writing. `Accordion Crimes' is a masterpiece of story-telling that spans a century and a continent. It opens in 1890 in Sicily, when an accordion-maker and his son, carrying little more than his finest button accordion, begin their voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion-maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynch mob, but his instrument carries the novel into another community of immigrants: German-Americans founding a new town in South Dakota. Moving from South Dakota to Texas, from Montana to Maine, the nine instantly compelling and intricately connected sections of the novel illuminate the lives of the founders of a nation, descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Germans, Irish, Scots and Franco-Canadians. Through the music of the accordion they express their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance.
Rarely has a literary novel so captured the hearts and minds of readers across America and the world as E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Now we have Proulx's new novel, Accordion Crimes, a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent.Accordion Crimes opens in 1890 in Sicily as an accordion maker completes his finest instrument and dreams of owning a music store in America. He and his eleven-year-old son, carrying little more than the accordion, voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynching mob, but his instrument carries Proulx's story as it falls into the hands of various immigrants who carry it from Iowa to Texas, from Maine to Louisiana, looking for a decent life. The music is their last link with the past -- voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance -- but it, too, is forced to change.Proulx's prodigious knowledge, heartbreaking characters and daring storytelling unite the sections of Accordion Crimes -- a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality.
A highly acclaimed collection of short stories set in the great outdoors of New England, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of `The Shipping News' and `Brokeback Mountain'. Just outside town, beyond the drugstore and the diner, there's another world - a wilderness - waiting to be explored. On the high, wooded hillsides there are deer to be stalked; far upriver there are quiet pools of trout, and grouse to be shot and traplines to be laid for fur. In the far-flung settlements of New England, life revolves around hunting. Whether they are yuppies from the town who think that country life is improving or natives who know all too well that it isn't, the men and women of these stories are all hunting for something better - though getting by at all is hard enough. These are men and women who live, love and lose; men and women who fall apart and who pick up the pieces, who dream useless dreams and go on dreaming whatever the disappointments. Tough and tender and irresistibly humorous, this unforgettable book takes its reader on a trail through the great outdoors to the innermost places of the heart.
May 2010 Good Housekeeping selection. On My Bookshelf by Nicci French...I have never met anyone who has read E Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News and not fallen in love with it. It has an odd cast of characters, awkward, bruised, unnoticed and failed. Without a drop of sentimentality, it is a miracle of storytelling.’ The Lovereading view... This novel has become a modern classic and deservedly so. Telling the story of Quoyle, who on the death of his wife moves the farthest reaches of Newfoundland. Tear and laughter abound in this story of a man trying to piece his life back together in the harsh but beautiful backdrop of Newfoundland. If you have yet to discover the joys of this novel rush and buy your copy now.
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