United States, Contemporary, Literary 

In The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx departs from the darkly fated heroes of Heart Songs and Postcards to explore the cracked-up contemporary 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 deserts. 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 70 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. By turns comic and dark, The Shipping News is a celebration of the American genius for storytelling and of E. Annie Proulx's vigorous contribution to the art, and magic, of the contemporary novel. 

Genre/Form: Domestic fiction
Fiction
Additional Physical Format: Online version:
Proulx, Annie.
Shipping news.
New York : Scribner ; Toronto : Maxwell Macmillan Canada ; New York : Maxwell Macmillan International, ©1993
(OCoLC)647033834
Material Type: Fiction
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: Annie Proulx
ISBN: 9780684193373 068419337X 9780671510053 0671510053 9780743225427 0743225422 9780743225403 0743225406 9780684857916 068485791X
OCLC Number: 26502801
Notes: A novel.
Performer(s): Kevin Spacey; Julianne Moore; Judi Dench; Cate Blanchett.
Awards: National Book Award for Fiction, 1993.
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 1994.
Description: 337 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Responsibility: E. Annie Proulx.