Annie Proulx

"Barkskins opens in New France in the late 18th century as Rene 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 Rene's children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, as well...

"Bird Cloud" is the name the author 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. She 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,...

Loyal Blood inalterably changes the course of his life and the fortunes of his family members when he deserts the family's New England farm after accidently killing his lover.

Before she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller The Shipping News, Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Her first collection of stories reverberates 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 challanged by the neorural bourgeoisie from...

Annie Proulx follows the success of Close Range with another remarkable collection of stories. Bad Dirt is filled with the vivid characters for which Proulx has become known. In "The Contest," the male population of Elk Tooth, Wyoming, vows to put aside their razors for two seasons, ante up ten dollars each, and wait to see who has the longest beard on July 4. Deb Sipple, the moving protagonist of "That Trickle-Down Effect," finds that his opportunism-and...