Annie Proulx

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...

Annie Proulx follows the success of Close Range with another remarkable collection of stories. Bad Dirt is filled with the vivid characters for which Proulx has become known. In "The Contest," the male population of Elk Tooth, Wyoming, vows to put aside their razors for two seasons, ante up ten dollars each, and wait to see who has the longest beard on July 4. Deb Sipple, the moving protagonist of "That Trickle-Down Effect," finds that his opportunism-and...

Bark Skins open in New France in the late 18th century as Rene 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 Rene's children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, as well as...

The friendship between Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two cowboys, evolves into an intimate relationship while they are working together as a herder and camp tender, sharing a bond that spans many years and frequent separations.