Postcards (Scribner Classics) - Hardcover

Proulx, Annie E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684833689 ISBN 13: 9780684833682

Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD, 1996

Synopsis

E. Annie Proulx's first novel, Postcards, winner of the 1993 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, tells the mesmerizing tale of Loyal Blood, who misspends a lifetime running from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman.
Blood's odyssey begins in 1944 and takes him across the country from his hardscrabble Vermont hill farm to New York, across Ohio, Minnesota, and Montana to British Columbia, on to North Dakota, Wyoming, and New Mexico and ends, today, in California, with Blood homeless and near mad. Along the way, he must live a hundred lives to survive, mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils and trapping, prospecting for uranium, and ranching. In his absence, disaster befalls his family; greatest among their terrible losses are the hard-won values of endurance and pride that were the legacy of farm people rooted in generations of intimacy with soil, weather, plants, and seasons.
Postcards chronicles the lives of the rural and the dispossessed and charts their territory with the historical verisimilitude and writerly prowess of Cather, Dreiser, and Faulkner. It is a new American classic.

About this title

Review:

Michael Upchurch "San Francisco Chronicle" Superb...."Postcards" makes Proulx as a gifted prose stylist who renders her characters on the page to mesmerizing effect.

David Bradley "The New York Times Book Review" Story makes this novel compelling; technique makes it beautiful.

Geoffrey Stokes "The Boston Sunday Globe" E. Annie Proulx's "Postcards" triumphantly delivers.

Frederick Busch "Chicago Tribune" A rich, dark and brilliant feast of a book.

Frederick Busch "Chicago Tribune" A novel that feels like a fifth or sixth, not a first. This richly talented writer announces with "Postcards" that we had better, from now on, be listening for her voice...astonishingly accomplished.

From the Back Cover:

'Postcards' is the story of Loyal Blood, a man who spends a lifetime on the run from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman. The odyssey begins on a freezing Vermont hillside in 1944 and propels Blood across the American West for forty years. Denied love and unable to settle, he lives a hundred different lives: mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils, trapping, prospecting for uranium and ranching. His only contact with his past is through a series of postcards he sends home – not realising that in his absence disaster has befallen his family, and their deep-rooted connection with the land has been severed with devastating consequences...

"The richness of America is portrayed with memorable effect in this remarkable first novel – Faulkner springs to mind. 'Postcards' is written from the heart and – for its raspy dialogue, laconic humour and beautiful description of the natural world – deserves to be widely read."
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

"'Postcards' is a remarkable novel; poetic and yet driven by a strong narrative, tragic and yet scored with deep veins of humour. Loyal Blood is one of those rare, haunted characters who continue to live in the mind after you finish the book. 'Postcards' is told in a resonant prose that both soars and gets down in the dirt – a debut which should be read by anyone who values fine, honest writing."
LITERARY REVIEW

"'Postcards' is a sweeping and dramatic tale. Proulx's deadpan style encompasses both heartbreak and hilarity, and the fantastic narrative flourishes are balanced with gritty realism. Not since Steinbeck has the migrant worker's life been so evocatively rendered."
DAILY TELEGRAPH

About this edition

• Publisher: Prentice Hall & IBD
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0684833689
• ISBN 13: 9780684833682
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 346