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Annie Proulx's The Shipping News--Pulitzer Prize & National Book
past
Sat, Nov 11, 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM GMT
David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, West 62nd Street, New York, NY, USA
Hosts
About
Note: November's book club is on a Saturday!
After October's hefty read we'll shift into some shorter works for the holiday season, starting with Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize winning and National Book Award winning 1993 novel The Shipping News (330 pages). This book also was the winner of the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award, and was a New York Times notable book of the year. Proulx's other novels have earned her a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Dos Passos Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes.
The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family.
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.
Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents).
As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.
Nice weather and we'll meet in the park. If it's raining we'll meet in the David Rubenstein Atrium at 63rd and Broadway.
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Annie Proulx's The Shipping News--Pulitzer Prize & National Book
past
Sat, Nov 11, 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM GMT
David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, West 62nd Street, New York, NY, USA
Hosts
About
Note: November's book club is on a Saturday!
After October's hefty read we'll shift into some shorter works for the holiday season, starting with Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize winning and National Book Award winning 1993 novel The Shipping News (330 pages). This book also was the winner of the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award, and was a New York Times notable book of the year. Proulx's other novels have earned her a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Dos Passos Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes.
The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family.
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.
Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents).
As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.
Nice weather and we'll meet in the park. If it's raining we'll meet in the David Rubenstein Atrium at 63rd and Broadway.
Going
Register to see all event details
Where your group belongs
Registration closed