Annie Proulx is the author of nine books, including the novels The Shipping News and Barkskins, and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story "Brokeback Mountain," which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Fen, Bog, and Swamp is her second work of nonfiction. She lives in New Hampshire.
"Barkskins leaves no board unturned as it covers the industry that
brought us plywood, cheap paper and prefab housing. [With] Proulx's
stunning stylistic gifts . . . She is a writer's writer, and one
whose deep interest in history provides the long view of how our
environmental recklessness has brought us to a point of
reckoning."-- "Ellen Emry Heltzel, Seattle Times"
"Barkskins is masterful, full of an urgent, tense lyricism, its
plotting beautifully unexpected, its biographical narratives
flowing into one another like the seasons. Ambitious. . . A marvel.
. .[Barkskins] is a long novel worth your time."-- "Charles Finch,
USA Today"
"Extraordinary. . . Barkskins is the masterpiece Proulx was meant
to write."-- "John Freeman, Boston Globe"
"'Barkskins' is Annie Proulx's greatest novel yet. [Her] talent for
bringing individuals alive with a single perfectly-turned line has
never been sharper than in these pages. ... It's a completely
masterful performance, the greatest thing this great novelist has
ever written."-- "Christian Science Monitor"
"Barkskins is an awesome monument of a book, a spectacular survey
of America's forests dramatized by a cast of well-hewn
characters.Such is the magnetism of Proulx's narrative that there's
no resisting her thundering cascade of stories. A vast woods you'll
want to get lost in. . . Barkskins is a towering new work of
environmental fiction."-- "Ron Charles, The Washington Post"
"A masterpiece, Barkskins encompasses a breadth of themes and
history rarely approached by any writer, girded by peerless
research and Proulx's X-ray vision into the human heart. But the
triumph of the novel lies in sentences that burst from the page,
ideas that move and breathe with mission."-- "Hamilton Cain, O The
Oprah Magazine"
"An epic capstone to 80-year-old Proulx's impressive career,
Barkskins surpasses even the extraordinary The Shipping News as her
finest novel."-- "Cliff Froehlich, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch"
"Annie Proulx returns with a great long read for the summer . . .
Worth the wait, [Barkskins is] a stunning, bracing, full-tilt ride
through 300 years of U.S. and Canadian history, told through two
families whose fortunes are shaped, for better and worse, by the
Europeans' discovery of North America's vast forests. With
Barkskins, Annie Proulx blows out the horizons. The novel has a
satisfying global sweep, with the type of full-immersion plot that
keeps you curled in your chair, reluctant to stop reading.
Barkskins is a tour de force."-- "Elle"
"Annie Proulx weaves [a] wealth of research, [and] brilliant
imagination in [her] new novel Barkskins. Annie Proulx is a
fearless writer. Like Melville's whaling and McMurtry's ranching,
[Barkskins] provides a cast of colorful characters -- and a means
of examining their relationships to the natural world and the
continent's indigenous people. [With] delicious prose . . .
Barkskins has a large cast, but that's a showcase for Proulx's gift
for creating lively, complex characters. Proulx's style is
inimitably her own, but it echoes here with those of great
influences: Dickens, Melville, Twain, Faulkner and more."-- "Tampa
Bay Times"
"Annie Proulx's Barkskins is remarkable not just for its length,
but for its scope and ambition. It's a monumental achievement, one
that will perhaps be remembered as her finest work. . . It's
exhilarating to read Proulx, a master storyteller; she is as adept
at placing us in the dripping, cold Mi'kma'ki forests as in the
stuffy Duke & Sons parlors. Despite the length, nothing seems
extraneous, and not once does the reader sense the story slipping
from Proulx's grasp, resulting in the kind of immersive reading
experience that only comes along every few years."-- "Publishers
Weekly, starred review"
"Annie Proulx's stunning new Barkskins is a bracing, full-tilt ride
through 300 years of U.S. and Canadian history. With Barkskins, she
blows out the horizons. The novel has a satisfying global sweep,
with the type of full-immersion plot that keeps you curled in your
chair, reluctant to stop reading. Barkskins is a tour de force
[and] was worth the wait."-- "Elle"
"Annie Proulx's 10th book is ambitious and essential. Barkskins is
grand entertainment in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy.
Barkskins is awesome and urgent. And if we're lucky enough to
survive the Anthropocene we've seemingly wrought, then Barkskins
will surely survive as the crowning achievement of Proulx's
distinguished career, but also as perhaps the greatest
environmental novel ever written."-- "Peter Geye, San Francisco
Chronicle"
"Dazzling. . . Proulx's characters are vivid, insistent,
captivating. . . nary a page goes by without a few exquisitely
observed historical details. The temptation to consider Barkskins
under the rubric of a Great American Novel is difficult to resist,
given its scope. But Proulx's ambitions seem to be keyed
differently. Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's Huckleberry Finn,
Morrison's Beloved--all of these books might be doomed in their
respective attempts to somehow encompass the United States in its
full complexity, but they at least focus on that burgeoning and
manifold nation. Proulx, in contrast, establishes in Barkskins a
narrative so grand in spatial and temporal scope, so broad in
theme, that it cannot conceivably be strictly American. Her
pitch-perfect sentences, instead, encompass the entire Western
world, and its ever-growing concern with ecological and
environmental change."-- "Jeffrey Zuckerman, The New Republic"
"Enthralling. . . Proulx's human characters are vividly conceived.
Barkskins brims with a granular sense of human experience over a
period of 300 years. And like many novels by excellent writers,
Barkskins encourages understanding, if not empathy, for characters
whose outlooks we might usually dismiss. One of the great
achievements of this novel is to create a tragic personality for
the environment. Proulx's beautiful prose renders and exultant view
of the life of forest worlds lost to us." -- "Bookpage"
"Epic . . . Violent, monumental and often breathtaking, Barkskins
is a colossal achievement."-- "Columbus Dispatch"
"Few authors are as uniquely qualified as Annie Proulx (The
Shipping News) to sustain a novel as long as Barkskins. Pages melt
away as readers zoom through the decades. Proulx's story is bigger
than any one man, one death, or even one culture: It's about the
effect civilization and society have had on the land. In her
magical way, Proulx leaves the reader with an impression of not
only a collection of people, but our people and the country that
shaped us as we shaped it. This is Proulx at the height of her
powers as an irreplaceable American voice."-- "Entertainment Weekly
(Grade A)"
"Like the best realists, Proulx can make us see the world and its
inhabitants with greater clarity. Juggling so many different
plotlines and characters becomes easier when you have, as Proulx
does, a Dickensian gift for quick portraiture... Proulx reminds us
that the world we live in was made possible by the destruction of
the world that preceded it. The novel concludes with Saptisia Sel,
the head of the Breitsprecher Tree Project, asking, 'Can't we try
again? Can't we fix what we broke?' It's an urgent question,
perhaps the urgent question, one that we should all be asking
ourselves now."-- "Anthony Domestico, Boston Globe"
"Magnificent... Barkskins flies... One of the chief pleasures of
Proulx's prose is that it conveys you to so many vanished
wildwoods, where you get to stand 'tiny and amazed in the kingdom
of pines.' This is also the great sadness of Barkskins. The
propulsive tension here is generated not by wondering what will
happen to each character, but by knowing that the forests will be
leveled one after another... If Barkskins doesn't bear exquisite
witness to our species's insatiable appetite for consumption,
nothing can."-- "Anthony Doerr, Outside Magazine"
"Monumental. [With] prose of directness, clarity, rhythmic power
and oaken solidity. . . Barkskins is a potently imagined chronicle
of mankind's dealings with the North American forests."-- "Sam
Sacks, Wall Street Journal"
"The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Brokeback Mountain and The
Shipping News delivers an epic novel that begins with two
impoverished Frenchmen, full of hope, who migrate to Canada in the
18th century and become indentured woodcutters, or 'barkskins.' The
following 300-year history of two families spans cultures and
continents, and probes North Americans' predatory history with our
now-vanishing natural world."-- "Ms. Magazine"
"Towering. . . With gorgeous imagery, clean prose and remarkable
sensitivity, [Barkskins is] as powerful and important as any
literary work produced on this continent in the three centuries
spanned by the story. "Barkskins" is "The Giving Tree" for
grown-ups."-- "Sandra Levis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"
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