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The shipping news / E. Annie Proulx.

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: New York : Scribner ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; New York : Maxwell Macmillan International, c1993.Edition: 2nd edDescription: 337 p. ; 25 cmISBN:
  • 068419337X :
  • 9780684193373
  • 068419337X
  • 9780671510053 (trade pbk.)
  • 0671510053 (trade pbk.)
Subject(s): Genre/Form: DDC classification:
  • 813.54
LOC classification:
  • PS3566.R697 S4 1993
Kevin Spacey; Julianne Moore; Judi Dench; Cate Blanchett.Dissertation note: An unsuccessful newspaperman, his aunt, and his two young daughters experience delicately evoked changes in a poignant novel set in a Newfoundland fishing town. By the author of Postcards. Summary: In The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx departs from the darkly fated heroes of Heart Songs and Postcards to explore the cracked-up contemporary 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 deserts. 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 momentoes 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 70 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. By turns comic and dark, The Shipping News is a celebration of the American genius for storytelling and of E. Annie Proulx's vigorous contribution to the art, and magic, of the contemporary novel.
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Books Books Centeral Library First floor - Languages 813.54 P.A.S 1993 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 4321

An unsuccessful newspaperman, his aunt, and his two young daughters experience delicately evoked changes in a poignant novel set in a Newfoundland fishing town. By the author of Postcards.

Kevin Spacey; Julianne Moore; Judi Dench; Cate Blanchett.

In The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx departs from the darkly fated heroes of Heart Songs and Postcards to explore the cracked-up contemporary 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 deserts. 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 momentoes 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 70 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. By turns comic and dark, The Shipping News is a celebration of the American genius for storytelling and of E. Annie Proulx's vigorous contribution to the art, and magic, of the contemporary novel.

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