The Shipping News by 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 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.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 | 9780684193373 |
| ISBN 10 | 068419337X |
| Title | The Shipping News |
| Author | Annie Proulx |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Prentice Hall (a Pearson Education company) |
| Year published | 1994-01-26 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Prizes | Winner of Pulitzer Prize Fiction Category 1994, Winner of Irish Times Literary Prize: International Fiction Category 1994, Winner of United States National Book Awards: Fiction 1993 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |