Most Popular Books by Annie Proulx

The story of a well-meaning fugitive-at-large provides a glimpse of America''s past as it follows Loyal Blood from his home in Vermont, where he mistakenly commits a heinous crime, to the coast of California

A collection of short stories, which includes the short story, Brokeback Mountain.

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.

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.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx follows the success of Close Range with another remarkable collection of short stories set in Wyoming. Bad Dirt is filled with the vivid and willful characters for which Proulx has become known. Each occupies a community or landscape described in rich and robust language, with an eye for detail unparalleled in American fiction. In ''The Contest'', the men of Elk Tooth, Wyoming, vow to put aside their razors for two seasons and wait to see who has the longest beard come the 4th of July. Deb Sipple, the moving protagonist of ''That Trickle Down Effect'', finds that his opportunism - and his smoking habit - lead to a massive destruction. And ''What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick? '' is the story of Gilbert Wolfscale, whose rabid devotion to his ranch drives off his wife and sons. Proulx displays her wit in every story of this stunning collection, as well as her knowledge of the West, of history, of ranching and farming. Her profound sympathy for characters who must use sheer will and courage to make it in tough territory makes this collection extraordinarily compelling.

From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Proulx, an "unforgettable" (Miami Herald) and "vivid" (Oprah Daily) collection of stories set in Wyoming. Winner of two O. Henry Prizes, Annie Proulx has been anthologized in nearly every major collection of great American stories. Her bold, inimitable language, her exhilarating eye for detail, her dark sense of humor, and her compassion inform this profoundly compelling collection of stories. Proulx creates a fierce, visceral panorama of American folly and fate in these nine dazzling stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West. Each character is a pioneer of a sort—some are billionaires, some are escapists, and some just think the rest of the country has it wrong. Deeply sympathetic to the men and women fighting to survive in this harsh place, Proulx turns their lives into fiction with the power of myth, leaving the reader in awe.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx''s mesmerising stories inspired by the harsh and unforgiving landscape of Wyoming are gathered together in this collectable volume.

"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"--

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.

''I been lookin at people on the street. This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?'' Wyoming, 1963. A wild, unforgiving land where people live simple, unforgiving lives. When ranch hands Ennis and Jack take seasonal jobs on the isolated Brokeback Mountain, they find companionship in each other. And then they find something more. Brokeback Mountain tells the heartbreaking tale of an irresistible and hidden love spanning twenty years, and its tragic consequences. Based on a short story by Annie Proulx, this stage adaptation by Ashley Robinson, with songs by Dan Gillespie Sells, opened at @sohoplace in London''s West End in 2023. It was directed by Jonathan Butterell, and featured Mike Faist and Lucas Hedges as Jack and Ennis, with Eddi Reader performing the songs. As Annie Proulx said of the adaptation, ''Brokeback Mountain has been recreated in several different forms, each with its own distinctive moods and impact. Ashley''s script is fresh and deeply moving, opening sight lines not visible in the original nor successive treatments.''

A companion to the film Brokeback Mountain, featuring the story, the screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, and essays about the process and the collaboration. Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, Brokeback Mountain is her masterpiece. Brokeback Mountain was originally published in The New Yorker. It won the National Magazine Award, as well as an O. Henry Prize. Included in this volume is Annie Proulx''s haunting story about the difficult, dangerous love affair between a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy. Also included is the celebrated screenplay for the major motion picture Brokeback Mountain, written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. All three writers have contributed essays on the process of adapting this critically acclaimed story for film.

Now an Academy Award-winning Netflix film by Jane Campion, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst: Thomas Savage''s acclaimed Western is "a pitch-perfect evocation of time and place" (Boston Globe) for fans of East of Eden and Brokeback Mountain. Set in the wide-open spaces of the American West, The Power of the Dog is a stunning story of domestic tyranny, brutal masculinity, and thrilling defiance from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in American literature. The novel tells the story of two brothers — one magnetic but cruel, the other gentle and quiet — and of the mother and son whose arrival on the brothers’ ranch shatters an already tenuous peace. From the novel’s startling first paragraph to its very last word, Thomas Savage’s voice — and the intense passion of his characters — holds readers in thrall. "Gripping and powerful...A work of literary art." —Annie Proulx, from her afterword

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.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 NOW A MAJOR TELEVISION SERIES From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world’s forests.

*Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Literary Hub!* A Finalist for the 2022 NBCC Awards in Nonfiction, the 2023 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award, and the NEIBA 2023 New England Book Award* From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx, this riveting deep dive into the history of our wetlands and what their systematic destruction means for the planet “is both an enchanting work of nature writing and a rousing call to action” (Esquire). “I learned something new—and found something amazing—on every page.” —Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See and Cloud Cuckoo Land 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). “A stark but beautifully written Silent Spring–style warning from one of our greatest novelists.” —The Christian Science Monitor

The arts of flyfishing and storytelling come together in a collection featuring short stories or sections of novels by Tom McGuane, Nick Lyons, E. Annie Proulx, Robert Jones, Jim Enger, David Seybold, Sydney Lea, Mallory Burton and other fine writers who love to fish with flies.

Annie Proulx, ganadora del premio Pulitzer, nos narra esta estremecedora historia de amor entre dos vaqueros, una historia capaz de sobrevivir a todo excepto a la salvaje intolerancia del mundo que los rodea. Ennis del Mar y Jack Twist son dos rancheros que se conocen cuando aceptan un trabajo para apacentar juntos un rebaño por encima de la zona arbolada en Brokeback Mountain. Ese verano surgirá entre ellos una intensa historia de amor.

Watercolor paintings of the landscape and people of the West interspersed with a narration by Annie Proulx of Matthews'' life and work with insight into both the ranching life and the art-making life.

Recounts myths of the closing decades of the western frontier viewed through the eyes of Nellie Courtright and her brother Jackson, orphans that make good in the town of Rita Blanca in what would become the Oklahoma Panhandle.

Since 1973, Storey''s Country Wisdom Bulletins have offered practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily. There are now more than 170 titles in this series, and their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life.