The Shipping News (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by Annie Proulx

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Web ID: 16778137

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.

  • Product Features

    • Suggested age range- Adult
    • Format- Paperback
    • Dimensions- 5.5" W x 8.3" H x 1" D
    • Genre- Fiction
    • Publisher- Scribner, Publication date- 06-01-1994
    • Page count- 368
    • ISBN- 9780671510053

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1 review
2 years ago
from Troy, MI

Unravelling all the Knots

When you ask people what their favorite book is most folks can't commit to just one. Since I turned the last page of The Shipping News back in 1999 there has never been another book quite like it and no book has come close to replacing it. It's quite simple really; I live inside this book. This book lives inside my head. The weather, the storms, the knots, the water, the boats, the people, the town, the history, the ghosts, the past and the mental turbulence that rocks every page of this novel is inside me. I am Quoyle and I had a Petal and now have a Wavey. The emotional weight and the heaviness of water feel eerily like my dealing with mental illness. Annie Proulx didn't write this book for me of course, but the best books always feel like they were. I was born near the ocean so water is part of my blood, and traversing along with Proulx's cast of incandescent characters is like swimming with family. The way the book is written, the language and flow feels invasive and insidious and left me reeling after every chapter. As you finish each chapter and unravel the knots it feels like your life (and all the trauma, the afflictions, the falsity and the emptiness) and erased and you are left with peace. I adore this novel more with every reread, and find myself marking the time when I can be with these friends again. It's sense of mythology and history entwined within its brutal setting make this novel a constant walk into your own backstory. Just let the words or waves take you on a journey.

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