Heart Songs and Other Stories

Before she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestsellerThe 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.

E. Annie Proulx won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1993 National Book Award for Fiction, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize for The Shipping News. Postcards, her first novel, won the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award. Her articles and stories appear in many periodicals and anthologies. Ms. Proulx lives in Vermont and Newfoundland.