Proulx, Annie

The shipping news by Annie Proulx( Book )
169 editions published between 1955 and 2011 in 20 languages and held by 4,596 libraries worldwide
In The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx departs from the darkly fated heroes of Heart Songs and Postcards to explore the cracked-up contemporary 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 deserts. 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 momentoes 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 70 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. By turns comic and dark, The Shipping News is a celebration of the American genius for storytelling and of E. Annie Proulx's vigorous contribution to the art, and magic, of the contemporary novel.

Close range : Wyoming stories by Annie Proulx( Book )
88 editions published between 1999 and 2009 in 13 languages and held by 3,247 libraries worldwide
A collection of stories set in Wyoming. They range from The Mud Below, on an itinerant rodeo cowboy, to People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water, which is on a family feud.

Accordion crimes by Annie Proulx( Book )
68 editions published between 1996 and 2011 in 12 languages and held by 3,165 libraries worldwide
A tale of immigrants centered on an accordion brought to America in the 1880s. After its Italian owner is murdered, the instrument passes into the hands of other ethnic groups--German, French-Canadian, Mexican, Polish, Norwegian--and the novel describes their ceremonies, dreams and hates. By the author of The Shipping News.

That old ace in the hole : a novel by Annie Proulx( Book )
81 editions published between 2002 and 2009 in 9 languages and held by 2,970 libraries worldwide
Assigned to locate land in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma that can be purchased and converted into pig farms for his employer, Bob Dollar meets the residents of Woolybucket and comes to respect their fierce desire to retain their land.

Postcards by Annie Proulx( Book )
64 editions published between 1992 and 2009 in 8 languages and held by 2,331 libraries worldwide
Postcards are the only communication between Loyal Blood and the poor, hardworking farm family he leaves behind in Vermont. The secret Loyal carries with him--the accidental killing of his girlfriend, Billy--is revealed in the first pages, and thereafter, as he prospects for uranium, traps coyotes, or digs for dinosaur bones, his messages continue to arrive home from across the U. S., long after his father has died and his brother, sister, and mother have moved away.

Brokeback Mountain( visu )
9 editions published between 2006 and 2007 in English and held by 2,286 libraries worldwide
It's 1963, a time in the United States when life was simple, straightforward and the lines between the sexes and sex roles were crisply drawn and severely delineated. Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist find themselves thrown together when they are hired to tend sheep in the remote area of Brokeback Mountain, Wyoming. Because of the job, the two are forced to spend many hours together alone in the wild. Ennis and Jack are inexorably drawn to each other through their proximity, loneliness and through a shared lack of tenderness and emotion in their lives and are emotionally, physically and psychically bonded to each other almost from the start.

Fine just the way it is by Annie Proulx( Book )
21 editions published between 2007 and 2010 in 3 languages and held by 2,030 libraries worldwide
Pioneer homesteaders facing drought and debt give way to modern-day hippies trying to lose themselves in the vanishing wilderness and real estate developers out to make a buck-unforgettable characters in nine stories that range in tone from crude cowboy humor to heartbreaking American tragedy.

Bad dirt : Wyoming stories 2 by Annie Proulx( Book )
20 editions published between 2004 and 2007 in 3 languages and held by 2,017 libraries worldwide
An anthology of short stories, all set in Wyoming, features characters who have a profound effect on the people around them, in such tales as "The Trickle Down Effect," "The Contest," and "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?"

Brokeback mountain by Annie Proulx( Book )
47 editions published between 1997 and 2010 in 10 languages and held by 1,920 libraries worldwide
The story of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two cowboys who share a small tent while working as herders and camp tenders during a summer spent on a range far above the tree line. They fall into a relationship that at first seems solely sexual but then reveals itself to be something more. Both men marry and have families, but over the course of many years and frequent separations they find their relationship becomes the most important thing in both their lives, and they do anything they can to maintain it. Proulx's description of their bond is beautiful and haunting and often brutal in its portrayal of the hardships, and ultimately the violence, they face.

Bird Cloud : a memoir by Annie Proulx( Book )
9 editions published in 2011 in English and held by 1,656 libraries worldwide
"Bird Cloud" is the name the author gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four hundred 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. She also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it, a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Her first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, this book is the story of designing and constructing that house, with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region, inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians, and a family history, going back to nineteenth century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers. The author here 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.