The Shipping NewsWinner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx's 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. |
Contents
Section 1 | 1 |
Section 2 | 18 |
Section 3 | 28 |
Section 4 | 35 |
Section 5 | 48 |
Section 6 | 56 |
Section 7 | 71 |
Section 8 | 78 |
Section 18 | 173 |
Section 19 | 179 |
Section 20 | 190 |
Section 21 | 197 |
Section 22 | 206 |
Section 23 | 216 |
Section 24 | 224 |
Section 25 | 250 |
Section 9 | 90 |
Section 10 | 99 |
Section 11 | 112 |
Section 12 | 122 |
Section 13 | 130 |
Section 14 | 136 |
Section 15 | 141 |
Section 16 | 145 |
Section 17 | 154 |
Section 26 | 259 |
Section 27 | 272 |
Section 28 | 284 |
Section 29 | 289 |
Section 30 | 299 |
Section 31 | 312 |
Section 32 | 324 |
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Common terms and phrases
Agnis ANNIE PROULX ASHLEY BOOK aunt aunt's Beety Billy Pretty blue boat BOOK OF KNOTS Bunny Capsize Cove chin coast dead Dennis Diddy door eyes father figgy duff fingers fish Gammy Bird Gandy Goose Gaze Island girls glass Grand Banks hair hand head heard Herry Hurricane Bob Jack Buggit kids Killick-Claw kitchen knew laughed leaned lobster looked Misky Bay morning mouth never Newfoundland night Nutbeem paper Partridge Petal pulled Quoyle's Point road rock rolled ship shore shouted shrimp skiff sleep smell snow snowmobile station wagon storm story Sunshine talk tartar sauce tell Tert Card There's thing trailer truck upholstery voice walked Warren watch waves Wavey Wavey's weather week wind window woman wreck Yark