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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.
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.
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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