Annie Proulx
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.
Reviews of Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place
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- ‘Proulx’s prose is monumental’ Observer
- ‘Magic … Books are like homes and within 10 pages of crossing the threshold of this one readers will put up their feet, secure in the knowledge that they won’t be moving on to another any time soon ‘ Geoff Dyer, Observer
- ‘A love letter to place…which interweaves details of the land’s daily upkeep with her own equally evocative history’ Vogue
- A masterpiece’ A. N. Wilson
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The Shipping News (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)
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Heart Songs
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Barkskins: Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017
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Barkskins: Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017
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Barkskins: Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017
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Barkskins: Longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017
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The Shipping News
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Wyoming Stories Box Set
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Close Range: Wyoming Stories
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Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3
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The Shipping News
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Brokeback Mountain
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Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2
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That Old Ace in the Hole
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Accordion Crimes
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Heart Songs
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The Shipping News
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Postcards
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Close Range: Wyoming Stories
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Postcards
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The Shipping News
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Accordion Crimes
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Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3
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Heart Songs
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Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2
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Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3
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Close Range
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Postcards
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The Shipping News
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That Old Ace in the Hole
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Bird Cloud
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Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2
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Close Range
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