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Heart Songs and Other Stories
by: Annie Proulx

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780020360759
ISBN: 0020360754
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: March 17, 1995
Publisher: Scribner
Sales Rank: 287070
Studio: Scribner

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Editorial Review:

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.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Stories with Heart
These stories about the small-town life of rural New England more than lived up to the enticing professional reviews on the book cover. Each story grabbed me from the first sentence and never let go. For example, one story starts with: "Two Jehovah's Witnesses, suffering in hot clothes, found the bodies a little before the cloudburst."

Rating:

- 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 ... Read More

Rating:

- 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.

Rating:

- 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 ... Read More

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