Overview
Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of Annie Proulx's piece of the Wyoming landscape and her home there. ""Bird Cloud"" is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-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 fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it--a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house--with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region--inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and Shoshone Indians--and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers. Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here 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.
Full Product Details
Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Imprint: Simon & Schuster
Dimensions:
Width: 13.90cm
, Height: 1.80cm
, Length: 21.30cm
Weight: 0.236kg
ISBN: 9780743288811
ISBN 10: 0743288815
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 27 September 2011
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.
Reviews
Gorgeous descriptions... Unforgettable anecdotes. --Alexandra Fuller, New York Times Book Review
Annie Proulx has a wit as sharp as the winter winds of Wyoming. <b>Bob Minzesheimer, <i>USA Today</i></b>
Author Information
Annie Proulx is the author of nine books, including the novels The Shipping News and Barkskins, and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story ""Brokeback Mountain,"" which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Fen, Bog, and Swamp is her second work of nonfiction. She lives in New Hampshire.
