The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (1993)

Winner of both the Pultizer Prize and The National Book Award

My Posts on Annie Proulx

Prior to today I have posted on three short stories by Annie Proulx, including her most famous story, "Brokeback Mountain" as well as her just published novel centering on the development of the lumbering industry, Barkskin.  Barkskin is being proclaimed all over the literary world as a master work and I expect it to win numerous awards.  I loved it and when I got an e mail notice saying her 1993 novel, Shipping News was marked down, in the Kindle edition, from $11.95 to $1.95 I acquired it. 

My bottom line here is first read Barkskin, especially if you love grand sized  historical novels.  Then if Shipping News is still priced at $1.95 and you loved Barkskin, then consider reading it.  I would not issue a general buy recommendation at $11.95 for Shipping News.

Shipping News centers on Quoyle and his young daughter.  Quolye's wife, a throughly dispicable woman who cheated on him numerous times, left him, took their daughter and sold her to a black market adoption agency.  He rescues her and they move from New York State to his ancestral home in Newfoundland, Canada.  

Newfoundland comes across as a terrible place, freezing cold with few opportunities outside of working in the dwindling cod fishing industry.  Quoyle has an aunt living there who helps him settle into a house.  He lucks into a job writing articles for a local news paper, he ends up specializing in news about the shipping industry. He also writes about auto wrecks and people arrested for sexual perversions. His aunt has a business doing marine upholstery.  At first the people in the town all seem like grotesques in a horror setting but slowly they come to life.  Quoyle, who never really gets over his wife, meets a decent woman.

There are lots of exciting events in Shipping News, Newfoundland can be a brutal place.  Most young residents want to leave.  

 

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film.  from publisher's  web page

Mel u

"Rough Deeds" by Annie Proulx (in The New Yorker, June 10, 2013)

It is hard to find top rate historical short stories as an author has less time to create an atmosphere.  "Rough Deeds" by Annie Proulx, set in the early 18th century in Canada, called "New France" still by many, is a very good historical short story.  It centers on a very tough business man who is logging the Canadian and Maine woods for masts for European ship builders. It takes fifty acres of woodland to build one ship.  He soon begins to build significant wealth through shipping the logs to European ports and coming back with a cargo of goods for import.   He, in partnership with another man, begins to buy up massive acreage of timber.  The problem is timber poachers. I learned a lot about the connections of the timber business to international affairs and much more from this story.  I will leave the rest of this very atmospheric story unspoiled for first time readers.

I have now read and posted on four of Annie Proulx's short stories.  People die violently in each of these stories.  I have access to one more of her stories and hope to read and post on it soon.

You can read, for a limited time, the story here.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/10/rough-deeds

Please share your experience with Annie Proulx with us.

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent book is Fine Just the Way It Is. She lives in Wyoming. - from publisher web page

Mel u

"Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx (from Close Range: Wyoming Stories, 1999)

"Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx was first published in The New Yorker October 13, 1997 and in an slightly expanded version in Close Range:  Wyoming Stories.  It was made into a movie in 2005.   Set in modern Wyoming  from 1963 to 1983 it is the story of two cowboys who fall in love.  Many more people will snigger at the expression "Brokeback Mountain" than will ever read the story.  It strikes at the very heart of the American myth of the macho cowboy.  There is only one explicitly sexual scene in the story and it is very powerful, perhaps because we are not expecting anything this vivid and we are shocked by what happens.  Rugged cowboys are not supposed to do this kind of thing in a society which worships masculinity and hates any sign of male homosexuality as an affront to Wyoming and the American way!  The two men have an encounter that is tender and erotic, it surprises both of them but they accept it without shame.  They go there own ways, over the course of twenty years each marries and has children and girlfriends,  They do manage to reunite on and off over the years and I think both think maybe they would have been better off with each other.  They live in a violently homophobic society where gay suspected men have been murdered.  I have left out a lot of this very rich story so as not to interfere with first time readers experiences. 

Proulx brings twenty years very much to life for us.  This is a great story.  It gives us a strong feel for Wyoming life.

This is the third story by Proulx I have read.  I have access to two more and will read them soon.

This story can be found online.  I do not include a link as I am not sure if it is authorized or not.

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent book is Fine Just the Way It Is. She lives in Wyoming. - from publisher web page

Please share your experience with Proulx with us

Mel u

"Them Old Cowboy Songs - Travails of a Homesteading Couple" (May 5, 2008, in The New Yorker)

Just a few days ago I read, in the archives of The New Yorker,  my first work by Annie Proulx, "Tits Up in a Ditch".   I (http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2014/08/up-in-ditch-by-annie-proulx-june-9-2008.html) really liked this story and was gratified to find two more short stories by Proulx within the temporarily open archives of The New Yorker.  

Set in Wyoming, in the western USA in 1885, "Them Old Cowboy Songs" is a very powerful story about the attempt of a young couple, the husband is seventeen and the wife younger, to make a life for themselves in a very hard time and place.  Archie inherited $100.00 and he used it to buy eighty acres. He built a cabin for he and his wife to abide within.  We see their terrible hardships.  I liked it when I saw they had and cherished a cat named "Goldie".  We see their fear of Indians, the harsh winters and meet their neighbors.  Rose gets pregnant.  Archie imagines a son helping him on the farm.  The richest most powerful people were the owners of big cattle ranches.  Archie hears you can make good money working on a big ranch near him.  He learns the owner will not hire married men for far they will sneak away to see their families.  He lies and gets a job there.  

I will leave the rest of the story untold.  It is a very moving work.

You can read this story here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/05/them-old-cowboy-songs

I have links to three more of her short stories and hope to read them soon. 

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent book is Fine Just the Way It Is. She lives in Wyoming. - from publisher web page

Please share your experience with Proulx with us

Mel u

"Tits Up in a Ditch" by Annie Proulx (June 9, 2008, from The New Yorker)

I am having a wonderful time looking through the archives of The New Yorker.  The archives are open for the summer.  A quick look through the archives will find works by superstar writers and highly talented newer writers. As I go through the many short stories I am divided between reading works by writers I know and greatly admire like Roberto Bolano, Junot Diaz, and Jhumpa Lahiri and new to me big name writers like Annie Proulx, T. C. Boyle or Don Delillo let alone lots of authors I am totally unfamiliar with.  To be published in The New Yorker is the dream of most short story writers.  

Annie Proulx (1936, USA) is probably most famous for her O Henry Prize winning story, "Brokeback Mountain" from which a highly successful movie was made.  

"Tits Up in a Ditch" deals, as do much of her work, with the lives of people living on ranches in rural Wyoming, in the American west.  This was just a great story I totally loved.  It was also a work of nearly pure pain, of one tragedy after another.  It is about being macho, living the John Wayne way. Life is not easy working a ranch in Wyoming, there are constant accidents and unless you are very rich you have to work hard just to survive.  But in a way people are freer than those in cubicles, working the oil fields or...

I don't want to spoil your first experience with this story.  It is about dysfunctional families, bad fathers and strong mothers, daughters gone bad or maybe they just could not take the isolation.  It is about growing up dirt poor, about getting pregnant way too young.  It is also in a very profound way about America's wars in the Middle East.  Many of the young men and women from the ranches join the Army to escape and imagine themselves as one day heroes.  The central character of the story, a young woman, joins the army hoping to be trained as a medic.  She leaves her daughter behind with her grandparents.  Terrible tragedy unfolds in Iraq, which the characters call "Eye Rack".  

I am leaving out a lot of the profound richness of this story. The prose is just beautiful and you really feel you get a deep sense of Wyoming and its wide open spaces.   This is a very American story.  

There are lots of class issues in the story, which I have not mentioned.

You can read this story here

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/09/tits-up-in-a-ditch

I found a second Annie Proulx story in the archives and hope to read that before they close.

Mel u