Heart Songs and Other Stories

by Annie Proulx

Before she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx was already producing some of the finest short fiction in the country. Here are her collected stories, including two new works never before anthologized.

These stories reverberate with rural tradition, the rites of nature, and the rituals of small-town life. The country is blue-collar New England; the characters are native families and the dispossessed working class, whose heritage is challenged by the neorural bourgeoisie from the city; and the themes are as elemental as the landscape: revenge, malice, greed, passion. Told with skill and profundity and crafted by a master storyteller, these are lean, tough tales of an extraordinary place and its people.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction, American, Literature, The United States Of America, Contemporary

203 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1988

About the author

Edna Annie Proulx (Chinese:安妮 普鲁) is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. Brokeback Mountain received massive critical acclaim and went on to be nominated for a leading eight Academy Awards, winning three of them. (However, the movie did not win Best Picture, a situation with which Proulx made public her disappointment.) She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards.

She has written most of her stories and books simply as Annie Proulx, but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.

Reviews

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never read Proulx. So when I began this collection, I was blown away. By her incredible manipulation and craft with language and sensory details and ability to describe characters in a way I have never encountered before. I was wondering why I had not read her as an English major, another female writer lost to the canon.

I also admire a woman who can write about hunting, farming, gritty men and women and all that comes with a desolate, forgotten landscape. Images I will never forget: "jars of pears with cloves drifting like drowned men through the cloudy syrup," "threads of corn silk lay on the granite," "he was suffused with mounting nervousness like a bird before a storm," "Earl's wife, as thin as a folded dollar bill."

The collection did end in a way that was too unsettling and disturbing for me. Especially the final story, "Negatives." For me, there was nothing redeeming in the characters. The grit was too raw and mean, the actions too sadistic. Hence the 4 rating.

I am still very grateful to have found this at the library and will be reading other Proulx books!

[Dee · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

My first from Proulx and i found her writting style very interesting. She gets to the heart of the message and the characters are very homely or moreish. To me this had such a relaxed feel it was easy to enjoy and want to read on. Each individual story was strong and the messages within were true to life but i think it just lacked that grip that i notice other readers say about her other work. Depends what style your looking for at the time but i would reccommend this.

I look forward to reading the shipping news and others!

[James Barker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a hunter in spirit so I wasn't sure I'd take to this book. But beyond the brutality of the hunt and the poverty detailed in these richly captured stories of life in Chopping County, New England, is the emotional resonance E. Annie Proulx brings to all her work. These are indeed heart songs, songs of hearts flawed by the struggle for life. The tensions between those who are just surviving- those who are as native to the area as the deer- and the rich, summer part-timers who travel up for fantastical forays away from their modern, city-centred world, is evoked by the descriptions of the natives' loss- whether it is a secret hunting ground or their family history, lands or houses. As such, the poor seem to be as fair game as the grouse. For some, failure is the only option.

[Carita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd felt an aversion to Proulx's books ever since I saw Kevin Spacey in the movie version of her "Shipping News". I didn't dislike Kevin Spacey nor the movie, and the book had been highly recommended by a friend; it was just one of those unexplained, unexplored things. Then I picked up 'Heart Songs and Other Stories' at the Salvation Army for 50 cents, and one night I opened it. It was dark and quiet in the room, and in the second paragraph of the first story ("On the Antler") I read this:

"He went through his catalogues, putting red stars against the few books he could buy and black crosses like tiny grave markers against the rarities he would never be able to afford - Halford's 'Floating Flies and How to Dress Them', Lanman's 'Haw-Ho-Noo', Phillips' 'A Natural History of the Ducks' with color plates as fine as if the wild waterfowl had been pressed like flowers between the pages."

I turned the book over, looked at the tiny black and white photo on the back cover, and thought to myself, "Who the fuck is this woman and how is she writing this?"

I did that about ten or so times while reading this book.

A slightly uneven collection of 11 stories, mostly strong, mostly something else. So peculiar and far apart from my daily life, the world I see every day. A couple times I did mentally start dropping the adjectives away, just to see how a story would read, and found that they would breathe even more with fewer words. Be that as it may, happy to have discovered her.

[Kathrin Passig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wieder eine Frau, bei der es eigentlich unanständig ist, mit ihr meinen Bücher-von-Frauen-Anteil zu erhöhen (so wie Hilary Mantel und Fernanda Melchor). Es geht nur um wortkarge Männer, die angeln, trinken oder die Farm verkaufen, Frauen kommen höchstens als Versucherinnen, Essen auf den Tisch stellende Mütter, Randfiguren vor. Alle Geschichten schrammen knapp am "es passiert nichts, aber auf sehr bedeutungsvolle Art" vorbei, es passiert nämlich doch was, und meistens nicht das Erwartete.

[Ryan Lally · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Heart Songs..." sees Annie Proulx deliver nine stories of rural darkness, greed and dispossession. Referred to elsewhere as, 'Hillbilly-Noir', all the tales are situated in the beautiful yet coarse and unforgiving rural surroundings of New England. Proulx possesses an incredibly adept ability to describe nature and her surroundings, an ability whose likeness brings to mind the work of the late John McGahern, whose luminous descriptions of rural Irish landscapes played an equally integral part of his stories. Her capacity in this regard gives the reader an especially lucid sense of place, essentially allowing her to utilize the natural surroundings as an extra character, perfectly juxtaposed and reflected at parts with the caustic temperaments of the stories' inhabitants. The New England communities here find themselves completely at odds with an ever-burgeoning urbane population who are often portrayed as a hindrance or at the very least encroaching upon their way of life.

These tales are largely populated by hunters, fishermen, farmers and other blue-collar natives, most of which have been inured to violence or emotional traumas of some form or other. Many carry heavy emotional burdens which prove especially difficult to conceal and obscure from the tightly knit communities of of the landscape's 'squinting windows'. The implication seems to be that grit and hardiness of spirit are essential traits to possess in order to survive in this coarse landscape, yet these very same traits seem, ultimately, to have a corrosive affect on "Heart Songs..." protagonists. This may go some way towards explaining the dark undercurrents of malice and greed rumbling beneath the surface of many of these tales. The characters in fact bear a considerable resemblance to Breece Pancake's cast of dispossessed West Virginians in the posthumously released, 'Trilobites'.

The prose here is impeccable and, thematically, the stories cluster extremely well together, bound by common sense of darkness and place. While some of the stories drag the overall collection back, the stand-outs are simply among the best shorts I've read.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This should be subtitled "Northeastern Rednecks on Parade"! I thought this kind of people only came from the South! She sure knows how to create memorable dysfunctional characters.

These stories take place in rural Vermont among what I guess you'd call hillbillies. Kind of creepy people with long, weird family histories in the area. Some of the stories also involve rich city people who move to the area with glamorous notions of how it's going to be. Before long they find out how wrong they were.

This is the first I've read by this author. I think you have to read her stuff for the writing in itself, not just for the story. She's very skillful at giving a strong sense of the place and characters in a very few pages. I found myself pausing over a particular phrase or simile and thinking, "wow, that's really good." There aren't too many writers who have a distinctly unique (uniquely distinct?) writing style, but E. Annie Proulx is definitely one of these. You'll be reading along thinking, "This story's not that great...where's it going?" Then you get to the end and suck in your breath! She throws out some bizarre ending you never would have expected and it turns the whole story around.

[Sheba · Rating 5 out of 5]

Proulx is fucking brilliant. The first book I read by her was Shipping News and I was blown away at how she, like ee cummings used punctuation or the lack thereof to make words hang like actual things.

I like how well she knows her characters, she is describing a land, a culture, a way of doing things and she does so in a way that you can not only taste it, smell it but you actually get into a mood with each story--it's like you take on the actual mood of the people in the room (in the story).

I think that is an extraordinary thing--how multidimensional the dry page can become.

These are people I don't know and a way of life I have no familiarity with but am strongly attracted to. I am drawn to plains, and farms and ranches--I guess that is, so far a theme in most of the books that mean something to me.

I like the smell of bread and shit and grass and I like cold rooms and warm stoves...

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did Annie Proulx invent "hillbilly noir"? I am not sure, but she certainly had to be a front-runner, (this was first published in '88). Tough, raw-boned stories about the down-trodden in the wilds of New England. Bird-hunters, boozers and brawlers, all in shades of grey and brown. Throw in blood, unwashed bodies and a murder or two, and that should draw a perfect picture for you. Fans of Bonnie Jo Campbell & Donald Ray Pollock should eat this stuff up.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been reading Annie Proulx's work for quite a while in The New Yorker. She has been a rare bright spot in my reading of stories in that publication because she offers a rest from the New Yorker formula of dry, depressing stories about wealthy overeducated neurotics. Proulx writes stories about simple people in rural New England and that is so rare these days that she would be worth reading for that alone.

Unfortunately, I found this collection to be very uneven. There is one story in this collection that I will call a masterpiece. That story is Stone City and it is both the longest and oldest in this collection.

As a collection I think this suffers from the usual complaint I have about short story collections, that feeling of sameness you get after a while as if you are reading the same story over and over again. Proulx at least changes things up stylistically but two stories in this collection have almost identical plots while being written in totally different ways.

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunningly original short stories of flawed, dysfunctional people from the north east. Surprising, since you'll swear you're reading about some hillbilly from the South. Full of grit, humour, violence, poverty,sadness, hope. Real people, real places, REALLY good author. Most have apparently been previously published, but I hadn't read them before. Together they comprise songs of the heart of rural America.

[Jed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm dreading the end of these stories. They've been the perfect wintery companion since I got them for Christmas. No one, but no one, crafts a short fiction like Proulx and I wish to heaven they were each lengthy novels that I could enjoy indefinitely.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, sadly it looks like I won’t have another summer morning on my porch reading an Annie Proulx short story for the first time (though I could always reread) anytime soon, if ever. She is my favorite living author so I hope she lives into her hundreds and keeps up her amazing writing. She wrote this collection before the Wyoming stories and before her Pulitzer-winning novel The Shipping News. These stories take place in rural New England and generally feature interactions between insiders and outsiders and educational, class, and geographical differences. There are the wealthy who move into rural areas for the beauty and bucolic lifestyle, but end up causing raised prices and economic and actual displacement of their predecessor locals, then don’t understand the reluctance of those displaced to work for them when they will pay good money for the labor. The stories include many other different types of outsiders: missionaries wanting to convert, musicians wanting folk music experiences, photographers who find portrayals of local squalor more artsy than the natural beauty of the landscape, offspring who left and want to come back, and sometimes even just the downtrodden locals perceived as outsiders by locals who are better off. I love the way Proulx’s writing, settings, and characters are so vivid I am always transported into that other world of her stories, seeming to directly experience all of the perspectives resident in these exquisite, concise, perfectly structured, little literary gems.

[Clive Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A series of short and not so short stories all of which take place in Chopping County, New England. The themes and style of each story run so similarly that the book reads as a novel and sometimes it's difficult to remember that it's not a novel. Again the poetic writing but now it's New England and everyone hunts or keeps the local store. I read this book straight after reading Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath and was struck by the fact that unemployment in 'Grapes' meant starvation while in Annie Proulx's Heart Songs, unemployment means an agreeable life shooting and hunting for your own food. I can't give a flavour of the novel as it isn't one but the poetic type writing goes thus;-

"The deer hunt was the end and summit of his year: the irrevocable shot, the thin, ringing silence that followed, the buck down and still, the sky like clouded marble from which sifted snow finer than dust, and the sense of a completed cycle as the cooling blood ran into the dead leaves."

[Steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything about these stories is simply wonderful. These aren't characters; they are people, real people with all the delicious quirks that make them so human.

[Theo Bender · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unglaublich. Dieses Buch ist einfach unglaublich. Ich habe die Bücher von Proulx rückwärts gelesen, erst Schiffsmeldungen, für mich eines der drei Bücher, das ich auf die ominöse,einsame Insel mitnehmen würde, dann Postkarten, und nun dieses unglaubliche Werk, dieses Geschenk.
Herzenslieder sind Kurzgeschichten, die alle in den Bergen von Neuengland spielen. Die Schilderungen der Bewohner kleiner Dörfer, oft nur Siedlungen, der Eindringlinge aus großen Städten, die sich hier Ferienhäuser und -erlebnisse kaufen, und immer wieder der rauhen, oft menschenfeindlichen Natur sind von einer so außergewöhnlichen Präzision, versteckt oder offen zu Tage tretenden Schönheit und Wucht, die ihresgleichen sucht.
Oft sind es Geschichten vom Scheitern. An der Natur, an anderen Menschen, an alten Geschichten, die ihre Protagonisten wieder einholen, und an sich selbst. In meiner Erinnerung bleiben wird das Wechselspiel von filigranen, liebvollen Schilderungen der Menschen, der Natur, der Situationen, und der radikalen Kraft, bisweilen Gewalt, mit der sich immer wieder Wendungen und Schicksale einschreiben.
"Ein Buch, das noch großartiger ist als Schiffsmeldungen", schreibt The Times. Stimmt. Bleibt also nur noch ein Platz in meinem Koffer für die Insel.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This habit of his of sinking backward into the past sets him outside the events of the present. Everything has happened before: the deaths of children, the house burning in the night, the barred shadows of poplars lying across the road in late autumn, sharp-toothed illness biting into soft bones, loneliness, the village scourged by bearded invaders, the people cruelly tortured, a drunken reveler singing a half-forgotten verse in the dusk, the scent of bruised grass, the emptied cup, the slow wingbeat of a dying crow."

[Robert Day · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever stories. Clever writer.

These are worlds you want to read about but hardly ever want to be part of. Nightmarish normal lives.

Annie Proulx is probably one of the finest writers I've ever read. She makes the words get up from the page and dance. She inspires me to want to do the same (write, not dance).

Clever writer. Clever stories. Just read them.

[Old Man JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of short stories. These are stories that Proulx wrote earlier in her career before " The Shipping News" but weren't published in book form until later. They are all about people from the lower working class of rural New England living hard knock lives. Proulx is such a magnificent storyteller that it is difficult to select which is the best story but the title story "Heart Songs" stands out most. Its about a man who starts playing guitar with a small but very strange group of musicians hoping it will lead to bigger and better things but it didn't quite work out that way. A small but very enjoyable read.

[Ian Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written short stories. Beautifully descriptive of country and people, though a little bitter.

[Greynomad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, bad or indifferent her short stories are always enjoyable

[Kevin Pleasants · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spose I’m just a sucker for New England suffer prose

[Natalie Konigkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good!

[Simon Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

classic english-class-style short stories that make you go hey what the hell was that. what the hell man. but in a good way

[Maria Calinescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

the descriptions are delicious even though the stories are a bit too macabre and q disturbing

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent writing, dark stories, flawed characters, interesting read.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceptional sad melancholy broken hurts of men. Fav was Wer-Trout. Definitely setting up her vibe for future classics. So damn specific.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proulx's work is so meaty here, each tale travelling the same dark corridor so that you easily forget you are in the short story format.

Poetic, gorgeous language. The characters are flawed, ugly and strikingly original - just the way I like them.

The collection is aptly named for the standout piece, I read that particular tale 3 times and continue to be nourished by the main character's fervor for music & rust.

Enjoyed every beefy bite.

[David Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heart Songs and Other Stories by Annie Proulx (Simon & Shuster 1995) (Fiction). This is a collection of tales of rural Vermonters who must cope with weekenders from the big cities. Author Annie Proulx has moved her observational skills from Wyoming to Vermont for this exercise. No matter where she's writing about, I love Annie Proulx. My rating: 7.5/10, finished 2008.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has Annie Proulx's trademark descriptive jewels. She could've used a good hug or some Prozac while writing these stories, though. They tend toward gloomy, defeated themes and dark futures. Not the book to read if you're looking for a cheering lift. Still, there are some good O Henry endings. Overall, worth the read as long as you're feeling emotionally fit.