Annie Proulx has 11 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 17 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 61 ratings. The most-rated is The Shipping News.
The Shipping News
Summary
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why E. Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today. When Quoyle, a 36-year-old, third rate newspaperman, learns that his two-timing wife has abandoned him and their two daughters, he returns to his ancestral home on the Newfoundland coast, where amongst locals and three generations of his family, he begins to rebuild his life. Newfoundland is a dreary rock in the north Atlantic beset by lousy weather. Proulx recreates this barren location in her vivid, distinctive prose and populates it with a cast of amusing, richly human characters. The transformation each of the characters undergoes following the move is profound. And Proulx creates a simple and compelling tale of Quoyle's psychological and spiritual growth as he confronts his private demons. Along the way, we catch a glimpse of the maritime beauty of what is probably a fading existence.
©1995 E. Annie Proulx, All Rights Reserved (P)1995 Simon & Schuster Inc., All Rights Reserved
Barkskins
Summary
Now a television mini-series airing on National Geographic May 2020! A Washington Post Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain comes the New York Times best-selling epic about the demise of the world’s forests. “Barkskins is grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy…the crowning achievement of Annie Proulx’s distinguished career, but also perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written.” (San Francisco Chronicle). In the late 17th century, two young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters — barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a native woman and their descendants live trapped between two cultures. But Duquet runs away, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business. Annie Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over 300 years — their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand — the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation. Over and over, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse. “A stunning, bracing, full-tilt ride through three hundred years of US and Canadian history…with the type of full-immersion plot that keeps you curled in your chair, reluctant to stop reading” (Elle), Barkskins showcases Proulx’s inimitable genius of creating characters who are so vivid that we follow them with fierce attention. “This is Proulx at the height of her powers as an irreplaceable American voice” (Entertainment Weekly, Grade A), and Barkskins “is an awesome monument of a book” (The Washington Post) — “the masterpiece she was meant to write” (The Boston Globe). As Anthony Doerr says, “This magnificent novel possesses the dark humor of The Shipping News and the social awareness of Brokeback Mountain." PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2016 Annie Proulx (P)2016 Simon & Schuster
Brokeback Mountain
Summary
This is the film tie-in edition of the story by Annie Proulx, now a movie starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Randy Quaid, Anne Hathaway, and Michelle Williams. Brokeback Mountain is set in the beautiful, wild landscape of Wyoming where cowboys live as they have done for generations. Hard, lonely lives in unforgiving country. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are two ranch hands, "drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, tough spoken", glad to have found each other's company where none had been expected. But companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain, something not looked for, something deadly.
©1999 Annie Proulx (P)1999 Simon and Schuster Inc. This edition published 2006 HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, London, UK
Brokeback Mountain
Summary
Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it.
©1998 Dead Line Ltd. All Rights Reserved (P)1999 Simon & Schuster Inc., All Rights Reserved, AUDIOWORKS is an imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster Inc.
That Old Ace in the Hole
Summary
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind - his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms. Dollar finds himself in a Texas town called Woolybucket, whose idiosyncratic inhabitants have ridden out all manner of seismic shifts in panhandle country. These are tough men and women who witnessed first-hand tornadoes, dust storms, and the demise of the great cattle ranches. Now it's feed lots, hog farms, and ever-expanding drylands. Dollar settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for $50 a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Cafe, targets Ace and Tater Crouch's ranch for Global Pork, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old owners will hold on to their land, even though their children want no part of it. Robust, often bawdy, strikingly original and intimate, That Old Ace in the Hole tracks the vast waves of change that have shaped the American landscape and character over the past century. In Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irresistible characters in contemporary fiction.
©1993 Annie Proulx (P)2011 Simon & Schuster
Bird Cloud
Summary
“Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and 400-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. Proulx 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, and she knew what she wanted to build on it—a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Proulx’s first work of nonfiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house—with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region—inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians— and a family history, going back to 19th-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time. Bird Cloud is magnificent.
©2011 Simon & Schuster (P)2011 Dead Line, Ltd
Fine Just The Way It Is
Summary
2009 Audie Award Finalist for Short Stories/Collections Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain" (in her first volume of Wyoming Stories) and Bad Dirt, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral new collection. In Fine Just the Way It Is, she has expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate. "Every ranch...had lost a boy," thinks Dakotah Hicks as she drives through "the hammered red landscape" of Wyoming, "boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and 'unloaded' guns. Her boy, too...The trip along this road was a roll call of grief." Proulx's characters try to climb out of poverty and desperation but get cut down as if the land itself wanted their blood. Deeply sympathetic to the men and women fighting to survive in this harsh place, Proulx turns their lives into fiction with the power of myth -- and leaves the reader in awe. The winner of two O. Henry Prizes, Annie Proulx has been anthologized in nearly every major collection of great American stories. Her bold, inimitable language, her exhilarating eye for detail and her dark sense of humor make this a profoundly compelling collection.
©2008 Annie Proulx (P)2008 Simon & Schuster
Close Range
Summary
Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below", a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer", an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home. In "Brokeback Mountain", the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world's violent intolerance. These are stories of desperation, hard times, and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes, confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty, with the more benign values of the new west. This collection includes: "The Half-Skinned Steer", read by Bruce Greenwood "A Lonely Coast", read by Frances Fisher "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water", read by Campbell Scott "The Mud Below", read by Bruce Greenwood "The Blood Bay", read by Campbell Scott "The Bunch-Grass Edge of the World", read by Frances Fisher "Brokeback Mountain", read by Campbell Scott
©1999 Annie Proulx (P)2004 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
Accordion Crimes
Summary
Rarely has a literary novel so captured the hearts and minds of readers and listeners across America and the world as E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Accordion Crimes is another masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. The book opens in 1890 in Sicily as an accordion maker completes his finest instrument and dreams of owning a music store in America. He and his 11-year-old son, carrying little more than the accordion, voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynching mob, but his instrument carries Proulx's story as it falls into the hands of various immigrants who carry it from Iowa to Texas, from Maine to Louisiana, looking for a decent life. The music is their last link with the past - voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance - but it, too, is forced to change. Proulx's prodigious knowledge, heartbreaking characters, and daring storytelling unite the sections of Accordion Crimes - a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality.
©1996 Annie Proulx (P)2011 Simon & Schuster
Bad Dirt
Summary
A 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 10 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 his smoking habit - lead to a massive destruction. In every story in this book, Proulx displays her wit and her knowledge of the West, of history, and, most of all, of characters who must use sheer will and courage to make it in tough territory.
©2004 Dead Line, Ltd. (P)2008 BBC Audiobooks America
Selected Shorts
Summary
A lot can happen on the way from one place to another, especially when an overnight flight makes for an unexpected romantic encounter between strangers seated together; a trucker finds life beyond the ranch where he grew up; and a bored Midwestern housewife tries to escape Kansas City. This anthology of tales about people in transit features Stuart Dybek's "Pet Milk", read by Keith Szarabajka; Martha Gellhorn's "Miami-New York", read by Joanna Gleason; Edward P. Jones' "An Orange Line Train to Ballston", read by Sonia Manzano; Annie Proulx's "The Trickle-Down Effect", read by James Naughton; Dorothy Thomas' "The Getaway", read by Mia Dillon; James Thurber's "A Ride with Olympy", read by David Rakoff; and Eudora Welty's "No Place for You, My Love", read by Andrea Marcovicci.
©2008 Symphony Space, Inc. (P)2008 Symphony Space, Inc.