Barkskins: Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017 - Couverture souple

Proulx, Annie

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0007579322 ISBN 13 : 9780007579327

Editeur : Fourth Estate Ltd, 2016

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

“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)

“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)

“[It’s] a tale too beautiful to miss, excellent for long afternoons spent swaying in a hammock.” (Good Housekeeping)

“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)

"A masterpiece." (Buzzfeed)

“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)

“Part ecological fable à la Ursula K. Le Guin, part foundational saga along the lines of Brian Moore's Black Robe and, yes, James Michener's Centennial, Proulx's story builds in depth and complication without becoming unduly tangled and is always told with the most beautiful language. Another tremendous book from Proulx, sure to find and enthrall many readers.” (Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review))

“Proulx’s signature passion and concern for nature as well as her unnerving forensic fascination with all the harm that can befall the human body charge this rigorously researched, intrepidly imagined, complexly plotted, and vigorously written multigenerational epic. [With an] extensive and compelling cast, Proulx’s commanding epic about the annihilation of our forests is nothing less than a sylvan Moby-Dick replete with ardently exacting details about tree cutting from Canada and Maine to Michigan, California, and New Zealand, with dramatic cross-cultural relationships and with the peculiar madness catalyzed by nature’s glory. Here, too, are episodes of profound suffering and loss, ambition and conviction, courage and love. With a forthcoming National Geographic Channel series expanding its reach, Proulx’s commanding, perspective-altering epic will be momentous.” (Booklist, Starred Review)

“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)

“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)

Biographie de l'auteur :

E. Annie Proulx was born on 22 August 1935 in Connecticut USA, the state where her mother’s family of farmers, mill workers, inventors and artists have lived since 1635, but has spent most of her life in Vermont. She is the eldest of five girls. Proulx recounts her young life as follows. ‘I briefly attended Colby College in Waterville, Maine in the early 1950s, left to experience two terrible marriages, New York City, the Far East and single-mother-with-two-children poverty.’ In 1963 she went back to school and studied history at the University of Vermont from 1966-69, graduating cum laude. She then went on to take an MA before beginning work on a doctorate. In 1975 she abandoned her doctoral thesis and started work as a freelance journalist. During this time she lived with a friend in a shack in rural Canaan on the Canadian border, in ‘brutally poor circumstances’. As she recalls, ‘compensation were silence and good fishing. From 1975 to 1988 I wrote articles on weather, apples, canoeing, mountain lions, mice, cuisine, libraries, African beadwork, cider and lettuces for dozens of magazines. Payments were usually late and small. It was a miserable way to make a living’. Whenever she could squeeze in the time she wrote stories, averaging about two a year. In recent years grants from the Vermont Council of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation as well as publishers’ advances, have enabled her to devote her time to writing. She has three sons. Her interests include cooking, music, wine, fly-fishing, good conversation, canoeing, camping, bird hunting, gardening, landscape work, carpentry, painting, homemade bread, knots and wood-lore. She describes herself as an ‘omnivorous reader, happy with a mining journal or a speed-boat-freak-mag if nothing else is available’. She likes the cold and snow, sharp seasonal changes and weather extremes. E. Annie Proulx wrote her first novel, Postcards, in her fifties and followed it with The Shipping News, which won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the US National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1994. In April 1998 she was presented with the US National Magazine Award for excellence in Fiction. She is also the author of a short-story collection, Heart Songs (Fourth Estate 1994). Accordion Crimes, was published by Fourth Estate in October 1996, and was followed by the publication of Brokeback Mountain, a short story which was published alone in October 1998. Close Range, a collection of short stories (which includes Brokeback Mountain) was published in June 1999.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Fourth Estate Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0007579322
• ISBN 13: 9780007579327
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 736