Understanding Annie Proulx

Understanding Annie Proulx PDF Author: Karen Lane Rood
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570034022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
In this study, independent scholar Rood introduces students and the interested reader to the writings of contemporary American writer Annie Proulx. Coverage includes a discussion of the major themes in Proulx's well-known novels such as Postcards, Accordion Crimes, and The Shipping News as well as three others. Rood also provides background information on Proulx's life and her development as a writer. c. Book News Inc.

Understanding Annie Proulx

Understanding Annie Proulx PDF Author: Karen Lane Rood
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570034022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this study, independent scholar Rood introduces students and the interested reader to the writings of contemporary American writer Annie Proulx. Coverage includes a discussion of the major themes in Proulx's well-known novels such as Postcards, Accordion Crimes, and The Shipping News as well as three others. Rood also provides background information on Proulx's life and her development as a writer. c. Book News Inc.

Barkskins

Barkskins PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501164481
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 736

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Book Description
“Magnificent.” (Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See) From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain” comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, marvelously dramatic novel about the destruction of the world’s forests. In the late seventeenth century, two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in Canada, then known as New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a seigneur, for three years in exchange for land, they become woodcutters—barkskins. Sel 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 hostile cultures. 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 and cultural annihilation. Again and 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 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 superb marriage of history and imagination.

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.

Accordion Crimes

Accordion Crimes PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416588884
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Proulx brings the immigrant experience to life in this stunning novel that traces the ownership of a simple green accordion. E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes is a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. Proulx brings the immigrant experience in America to life through the eyes of the descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Africans, Irish-Scots, Franco-Canadians and many others, all linked by their successive ownership of a simple green accordion. The music they make is their last link with the past—voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance. Proulx’s prodigious knowledge, unforgettable characters and radiant language make Accordion Crimes a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality.

Close Range

Close Range PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416588892
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short story collections of our time. Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below," a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer," an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home. In "Brokeback Mountain," the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world's violent intolerance. These are 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.

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.

Postcards

Postcards PDF Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416588914
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
E. Annie Proulx's first novel, Postcards, winner of the 1993 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, tells the mesmerizing tale of Loyal Blood, who misspends a lifetime running from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman. Blood's odyssey begins in 1944 and takes him across the country from his hardscrabble Vermont hill farm to New York, across Ohio, Minnesota, and Montana to British Columbia, on to North Dakota, Wyoming, and New Mexico and ends, today, in California, with Blood homeless and near mad. Along the way, he must live a hundred lives to survive, mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils and trapping, prospecting for uranium, and ranching. In his absence, disaster befalls his family; greatest among their terrible losses are the hard-won values of endurance and pride that were the legacy of farm people rooted in generations of intimacy with soil, weather, plants, and seasons. Postcards chronicles the lives of the rural and the dispossessed and charts their territory with the historical verisimilitude and writerly prowess of Cather, Dreiser, and Faulkner. It is a new American classic.

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.

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
From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx comes an exhilarating story brimming with language, history, landscape, music, and love. Bob Dollar is a young man from Denver trying to make good in a bad world. Out of college and aimless, Dollar takes a job with Global Pork Rind, scouting out big spreads of land that can be converted to hog farms. Soon he's holed up in a two-bit Texas town called Woolybucket, where he settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old Texas ranch owners will hold on to their land, even when their children want no part of it. Robust, often bawdy, strikingly original, That Old Ace in the Hole traces the waves of change that have shaped the American West over the past century—and in Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irrepressible characters in contemporary fiction.

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.