Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx
Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of the American West landscape and building a home there by Annie Proulx, winner of a PEN/Faulker Award, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award and author of the short story "Brokeback Mountain.""Bird Cloud" is the name Annie Proulx 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. Proulx 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 wilderness house in harmony with her work, her appetites, and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.
Bird Cloud 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 of wild terrain and an 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.
Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself in a memoir of solitutde, nature, land, and identity. 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.
Annie Proulx was born in Connecticut in 1935. She wins the PEN/Faulkner Award for her first novel, Cartes postales (1992), and the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award the following year for Noeuds et dénouements (Cahiers rouges, 2005). They'll see Les Crimes de l'Accordéon (Grasset, 2004), Un as dans la manche (Grasset, 2005), and the new Brokeback Mountain (Grasset, 2006), which is based on Ang Lee's famous film. Annie Proulx, regarded as one of America's greatest writers, currently resides in Wyoming.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780743288811 |
| ISBN 10 | 0743288815 |
| Title | Bird Cloud |
| Author | Annie Proulx |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
| Year published | 2011-09-27 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |