Product Description

Before she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized.

These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small-town life. The country is blue-collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87539 in Books
• Published on: 1995-03-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The acclaimed debut short story collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Downtrodden country folk in New England are at the heart and soul of this compilation of 11 short stories. The stories focus on rural activities (hunting or fishing) and sometimes delve into class differences between the poor townspeople and the rich outsiders. Although the subject matter may not appeal to every reader, the stories flow effortlessly and the prose is elegant. In "Heart Songs," Snipe pursues a calling in country music while recognizing in himself "a secret wish to step off into some abyss of bad taste and moral sloth." The author refers to another character as "thin as a folded dollar bill, her hand as narrow and cold as a trout." Proulx creates vivid characters with a clever turn of phrase or an illuminating analogy. This collection, initially published in 1988, includes two new short stories: "A Country Killing" and "Negatives." Recommended for most collections, though libraries with the 1988 edition may wish to pass.
Kimberly G. Allen, Network MCI Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Wendy Smith Cleveland Plain Dealer Proulx beautifully evokes the unchanging rhythms of country existence with a deep appreciation for life lived close to the earth....Her prose is supple, strong, and filled with striking images. -- Review

Customer Reviews

Proulx Pulls No Punches
One thing you must realize about Annie Proulx--she pulls no punches. Heart Songs and Other Stories is absolutely no exception to the rule.

In this collection of short stories, Proulx give us characters that are not terribly intelligent, sophisticated, attractive, or even likable. But, what they are is real. We've all met at least one of the characters in this book, and that's the magic of Proulx's writing. She's not interested in creating a romantic hero; she's interested in telling real stories about real people ... who happen to be fictional. And, like so many of us, they have moments that aren't exactly shining.

I've read quite a bit of Proulx, and this book is one of her earlier efforts. It's not quite as stylistically refined as her later work, but it is still a magnificent read. The fact she is absolutely so willing to spit in beauty's face makes her no-nonsense stories and rough and tumble characters all the more beautiful.

If you haven't read any Proulx yet, you really should.

~Scott William Foley, author of The Imagination's Provocation: Volume II: A Collection of Short Stories

I can never get enough
Nothing will ever top Annie Proulx's THE SHIPPING NEWS, but everything this
talented woman writes is a jewel. Her short story collections are just
riveting. The stories stay with me long after I've read them. Her characters
are rich and real. Many people have said they reread her sentences because
they are so dazzling and breathtaking. It's true. I look forward to anything she
she writes, as her fiction is the best.

Images Abound in Proulx's Style
Along with the use of active voice, something else jumped out at me the moment I had read a few pages of Proulx. She's loaded with images. Her images come mostly from apt and surprising similes. (That's not email "smilies.") As we learned in school, a simile is a figure of speech that expresses a resemblance between things of different kinds--usually formed with 'like' or 'as.'

Her similes bring to life her descriptions of people and enhance the concrete "feel" of things and places in her stories. The first sentence of the book has two of them, maybe not the best she has to offer, but two that immediately create images that pile up as she goes along: "Hawkheel's face was as finely wrinkled as grass-dried linen, his thin back bent like a branch weighted with snow." Another reviewer (Library Journal) has pointed out how she refers to a character as "thin as a folded dollar bill, her hand as narrow and cold as a trout." Maybe these images account for some of the appeal her style has for many readers. I for one find them satisfying and stimulating, here in the short stories even more than in Shipping News.