Reissued to coincide with THAT OLD ACE IN THE HOLE (Jan 03), the new novel from the Pulitzer-prize winning author of 'The Shipping News'. In 'Accordion Crimes' the hallucinatory power of Proulx's language and the radiance of her sentences confirm her genius. Accordion Crimes is a masterpiece of story-telling that spans a century and a continent. It opens in 1890 in Sicily, when an accordion maker and his son, carrying little more than his finest button accordion, begin their voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynch mob, but his instrument carries the novel into another community of immigrants, German-Americans, founding a new town in South Dakota. Moving from South Dakota to Texas, from Montana to Maine, the nine instantly compelling and intricately connected sections of the novel illuminate the lives of the founders of a nation, descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Germans, the Irish, Scots, and Franco-Canadians. Through the music of the accordion they express their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance.

A remarkable collection of short stories set in Wyoming from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Shipping News' and 'Brokeback Mountain'. 'Bad Dirt' is filled with the vivid and willful characters for which Proulx has become known. Each story occupies a community or landscape described in rich and robust language, with an eye for detail unparalleled in American fiction. In 'The Contest', the men of Elk Tooth, Wyoming, vow to put aside their razors for two seasons and wait to see who has the longest beard come the 4th of July. Deb Sipple, the moving protagonist of 'That Trickle Down Effect', finds that his opportunism -- and his smoking habit -- lead to a massive destruction. And 'What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?' is the story of Gilbert Wolfscale, whose rabid devotion to his ranch drives off his wife and sons. Proulx displays her wit in every story of this stunning collection, as well as her knowledge of the West, of history, of ranching and of farming. Her profound sympathy for characters who must use sheer will and courage to make it in tough territory makes this collection extraordinarily compelling.

Annie Proulx's highly acclaimed, international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Quoyle is a hapless, hopeless hack journalist living and working in New York. When his no-good wife is killed in a spectacular road accident, Quoyle heads for the land of his forefathers — the remotest corner of far-flung Newfoundland. With 'the aunt' and his delinquent daughters — Bunny and Sunshine — in tow, Quoyle finds himself part of an unfolding, exhilarating Atlantic drama. 'The Shipping News' is an irresistible comedy of human life and possibility.

The fantastic new collection of stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Shipping News' and 'Brokeback Mountain'. 'Fine Just The Way It Is' marks Annie Proulx's return to the Wyoming of 'Brokeback Mountain' and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. The stories are cast over centuries, and capture the voices and lives of the settlers this sagebrushed and weatherworn country has known, from the native Indian tribes to the modern day ranch owners and politicians, and their cowboy forebears. In 'A Family Man', an old man nearing the end of his life unburdens himself of the weighty family secrets that were his father's unwelcome legacy. 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' follows Archie and Rosie, a young pioneer couple, and their hardships in their attempt to homestead in the exposed wintry expanses of the prairie, and 'Testimony of the Donkey' finds a young international couple, Marc and Caitlin, struggling with much more modern concerns, and confronting uncertainty as their relationship comes to its end. These are stories of desperation and hard times, often marked by an inescapable sadness, 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. These are bold, elegant and memorable pieces, and once more confirm Annie Proulx as one of the most talented, unique short story writers in the language.

Annie Proulx, one of America's finest writers, invites us to share her experience in the building of her new home on a rich plot of untouched, unspoilt prairie and her pleasure in uncovering of the layers of American history locked beneath the topsoil. '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 knew she had to purchase the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she would 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 non-fiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of building that house — solar panels, a Japanese soak tub, a concrete floor, elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets — and an enthralling natural history and archeology of the region, inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians. It is also a family history, going back to nineteenth century Mississippi river boat captains and Canadian settlers, and an illuminating autobiography. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, 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.