That Old Ace in the Hole

That Old Ace in the Hole PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416588922
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
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 Café, 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.

That Old Ace in the Hole

That Old Ace in the Hole PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416588922
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Get Book

Book Description
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 Café, 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.

The Shipping News

The Shipping News PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743519809
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s 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 Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s 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 it’s 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 triumph—in 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 lover’s knot.

Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743275306
Category : Cowboys
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description
"Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working a sheepherder 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, and 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."--BOOK JACKET.

Bird Cloud

Bird Cloud PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743288815
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The author describes her purchase of six hundred wilderness acres in Wyoming and construction of a library-centric home where she contemplated her rich family history, including a river boat captain ancestor who met historical figures.

Hole in One!

Hole in One! PDF Author: Chris Rodell
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1449400035
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The golfer lines up the shot. It's a long one, and the chances of acing it are nil. He says a prayer, swings, and - hallelujah! - he scores a hole in one. Many golfers confess to murmuring earnest prayers that they, too, may join the 42,000 people a year who catch lightning in a bottle and score a hole in one. It's an excitement that many lucky golfers say they remember with more clarity than their first kiss. That's because nothing in the grand old game is as mysterious yet mundane as the ace. Scott Hoch has had 26; fellow pro Fred Couples just two. Blind men and women have hit them, as have first-time golfers, three-year-old toddlers, and hundred-year-old widows. Richard Nixon is the only president to have scored one and he said it was a greater thrill than winning an election. Filled with fun facts and anecdotes, Hole in One! is a comprehensive clearinghouse of unusual stories involving the aura and accomplishment of scoring an ace. Readers will find out how duffers call upon unusual good luck charms and customs from foreign countries to ensure their swinging success. Hole in One! is the perfect book for all golfers who love the game, whether they're accomplished players or rank amateurs.

Heart Songs and Other Stories

Heart Songs and Other Stories PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416588906
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Before she wrote the bestselling Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized. These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small town life. The country is blue collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

Holes

Holes PDF Author: Louis Sachar
Publisher: Yearling
ISBN: 0307798364
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This groundbreaking classic is now available in a special anniversary edition with bonus content. Winner of the Newbery Medal as well as the National Book Award, HOLES is a New York Times bestseller and one of the strongest-selling middle-grade books to ever hit shelves! Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes. It doesn't take long for Stanley to realize there's more than character improvement going on at Camp Green Lake. The boys are digging holes because the warden is looking for something. But what could be buried under a dried-up lake? Stanley tries to dig up the truth in this inventive and darkly humorous tale of crime and punishment —and redemption. Special anniversary edition bonus content includes: A New Note From the Author!; "Ten Things You May Not Know About HOLES" by Louis Sachar; and more!

Fen, Bog and Swamp

Fen, Bog and Swamp PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 198217336X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
"A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment-by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change. Fens, bogs, swamps, and marine estuaries are crucial to the earth's survival, and in four illuminating parts, Proulx documents their systemic destruction in pursuit of profit. In a vivid and revelatory journey through history, Proulx describes the fens of 16th-century England, Canada's Hudson Bay lowlands, Russia's Great Vasyugan Mire, and America's Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. She introduces the early explorers who launched the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and writes of the diseases spawned in the wetlands-the Ague, malaria, Marsh Fever. A sobering look at the degradation of wetlands over centuries and the serious ecological consequences, this is "an unforgettable and unflinching tour of past and present, fixed on a subject that could not be more important" (Bill McKibben)"--

Barkskins

Barkskins PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743288785
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 736

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Book Description
"Barkskins opens in New France in the late 18th century as Renae Sel, an illiterate woodsman makes his way from Northern France to the homeland to seek a living. Bound to a 'seigneur' for three years in exchange for land, he suffers extraordinary hardship and violence, always in awe of the forest he is charged with clearing. In the course of this epic novel, Proulx tells the stories of Renae's children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, as well as the descendants of his friends and foes, as they travel back to Europe, to China, to New England, always in quest of a livelihood or fleeing stunningly brutal conditions--war, pestilence, Indian attacks, the revenge of rivals. 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. This is Proulx's most ambitious novel ever, and her master work"--

Bad Dirt

Bad Dirt PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743273486
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx returns with another stellar collection of short stories bound to be even more successful than her bestselling, critically acclaimed Close Range. Annie Proulx’s new collection is peopled by characters who struggle with circumstances beyond their control. Born to ranching, drawn to it, or desperate to get out, they inhabit worlds that are isolated and often dangerous. Trouble comes at them from unexpected angles, and they drive themselves through it, hardheaded and resourceful. No one writes better than Proulx about the American west and about lives that may no longer be viable. This is a stunning collection by one of the most vivid and exhilarating writers of our time.