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Read Heart Songs And Other Stories (1995)

Heart Songs and Other Stories (1995)

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3.89 of 5 Votes: 3
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ISBN
0020360754 (ISBN13: 9780020360759)
Language
English
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Heart Songs And Other Stories (1995) - Plot & Excerpts

So from the beginning Annie Proulx has had a talent for cramming distinct details of place into her stories. It's telling that she began in hunting magazines like 'Gray's Sporting Journal', since the flora and fauna are so prevalent in most of her works. And the beauty of writing about an animal you are hunting is that you can go from the beginning when you are searching for the signs and longing for the sight of it to the moment that you tear it apart and look inside of it and cook it and eat it. These are not all about hunting, not even the ones about hunting, but the setting is rural New England, somewhere up in the mountains laced with poorly kept logging roads and hillbillies, and those hillbillies chief outlet of recreation is hunting (and screwing the most peculiar people they can find).The way the dialogue of the characters is put together read so much like rural Texan it sounded that way in my head. I've even been to the higher altitudes of New England but I'm not sure what the accent sounds like, it is probably dying. All I can think of is the codger in 'Pet Semetary' and he sounded like he was doing a bad impersonation of Jimmy Stewart.Also, authors who write about rural people love describing the morning breakfast. It only happens in one story here, 'A Run of Bad Luck', but I almost skipped that one just because of it. It is always the same no matter if it is Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Steinbeck, Robert Newton Peck, etc. Always the rowdy boys and the different ways they eat their biscuits and gravy and mother's internal thoughts and concerns. It is boring and tedious and only gets me hungry for skillet-cooked ham.Scary, hilarious, and authentic: The Annie Proulx signature style.

This should be subtitled "Northeastern Rednecks on Parade"! I thought this kind of people only came from the South! She sure knows how to create memorable dysfunctional characters.These stories take place in rural Vermont among what I guess you'd call hillbillies. Kind of creepy people with long, weird family histories in the area. Some of the stories also involve rich city people who move to the area with glamorous notions of how it's going to be. Before long they find out how wrong they were. This is the first I've read by this author. I think you have to read her stuff for the writing in itself, not just for the story. She's very skillful at giving a strong sense of the place and characters in a very few pages. I found myself pausing over a particular phrase or simile and thinking, "wow, that's really good." There aren't too many writers who have a distinctly unique (uniquely distinct?) writing style, but E. Annie Proulx is definitely one of these. You'll be reading along thinking, "This story's not that great...where's it going?" Then you get to the end and suck in your breath! She throws out some bizarre ending you never would have expected and it turns the whole story around.

What do You think about Heart Songs And Other Stories (1995)?

2008 bookcrossing journal: This is a collection of short stories from the fantastic writer Annie Proulx. I had actually read the first story in here before, in a different book of short stories. I think it was a collection by different female writers.ANYWAY. These are set in the American countryside and depict the rough tough life of self-sufficient men (and a few women), and rural poverty - something that happens over here in the UK as well, although people who don´t live in the countryside think it never happens. There are also a number of characters who have come from the cushioned modern life of luxary of the city to live in the country, full of ideals about rustic life, finding themselves and getting back to "reality". And what they manage to do is patronise the local population instead.There was one story that even had the elements of a ghost story - these two guys off on a fishing trip in the wilderness and the mist came down... I really liked the story about the guy trying to "get real" who joins this little family of musicians for weekday evening folk sessions: the fiddle player and the large lady who sang were interesting characters.There is a lot of hunting tales and the great outdoors in here, as well as rural poverty and tough lives. And whilst the writing is great, I don´t know whether this would be a book for everyone.
—Ape

I have been reading Annie Proulx's work for quite a while in The New Yorker. She has been a rare bright spot in my reading of stories in that publication because she offers a rest from the New Yorker formula of dry, depressing stories about wealthy overeducated neurotics. Proulx writes stories about simple people in rural New England and that is so rare these days that she would be worth reading for that alone. Unfortunately, I found this collection to be very uneven. There is one story in this collection that I will call a masterpiece. That story is Stone City and it is both the longest and oldest in this collection. As a collection I think this suffers from the usual complaint I have about short story collections, that feeling of sameness you get after a while as if you are reading the same story over and over again. Proulx at least changes things up stylistically but two stories in this collection have almost identical plots while being written in totally different ways.
—Christopher Roberts

Proulx writes wonderful prose - simple in structure and very descriptive. She paces the stories wonderfully, fleshing out some details and leaving others to be filled in by the reader. There is a slight tendency to sentimentality and predictability in the plots, but then short stories always tend to the formulaic because of the danger of wasting precious words on exposition.The subject matter is all very familiar to readers of Proulx - rural America (particularly New England in this collection), family, pick-up trucks, the outdoors, seasons. I'd recommend this book for its simple, engaging stories and brooding, slightly ominous mood.
—Rob Walter

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