The Shipping News [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Annie Proulx (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2004

'Fast becoming a contemporary classic...this book tries both to be critical and engender critical thinking in a number of ways. It offers an overview of a number of theories that address human distress as well as particular forms of 'pathology'. This book effectively highlights the way that western society has taken 'normal'; and 'abnormal' emotional states to be factual entities rather than the constructed understandings of human phenomena that they are...should be on the reading list of every course/module that attends to human distress' - "Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis". This practical and accessible critique of the institutions, practices and presuppositions that underlie the study of 'psychopathology' will be invaluable for students and practitioners who are working to understand mental health and distress. The authors - who come from backgrounds in clinical psychology, psychiatric social work, psychoanalysis, psychology teaching and action research - challenge the traditions of the field. They analyze the notion of 'psychopathology' as a conventional term in psychology and psychiatry through the language and institutions that hold it in place; explore the implications of deconstructive ideas for the theories and practices that sustain clinical treatments; and, offer an alternative way of seeing 'psychopathology', with accounts of critical professional work and good practice. "Deconstructing Psychopathology" is invaluable reading for students, academics and practitioners across a range of disciplines who are working to understand mental health and distress, including clinical and counselling psychology, psychiatry, psychiatric social work, counselling and psychotherapy.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This darkly comic, wonderfully inventive work, winner of the 1993 National Book Award, transforms the lore of Newfoundland--including shipwrecks, nautical knot-tying, horrid weather and family legend--into brilliant literary art. It is the story of the rebirth of Quoyle, a hulking, inarticulate, misery-ridden widower who flees upstate New York to take up residence in Newfoundland. The island of his forebears, Newfoundland is a dreary rock in the north Atlantic beset by lousy weather. Proulx lovingly recreates this hardscrabble location in her vivid, distinctive prose and populates it with a cast of amusing, richly human characters. Quoyle, a "third-rate newspaperman," makes a hit with his "Shipping News" column, while his anguish at the loss of his faithless wife is slowly transformed by the strengthening ties that bind him to the place and to his fellow Newfoundlanders. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Proulx has followed Postcards , her story of a family and their farm, with an extraordinary second novel of another family and the sea. The fulcrum is Quoyle, a patient, self-deprecating, oversized hack writer who, following the deaths of nasty parents and a succubus of a wife, moves with his two daughters and straight-thinking aunt back to the ancestral manse in Killick-Claw, a Newfoundland harbor town of no great distinction. There, Quoyle finds a job writing about car crashes and the shipping news for The Gammy Bird , a local paper kept afloat largely by reports of sexual abuse cases and comical typographical errors. Killick-Claw may not be perfect, but it is a stable enough community for Quoyle and Co. to recover from the terrors of their past lives. But the novel is much more than Quoyle's story: it is a moving evocation of a place and people buffeted by nature and change. Proulx routinely does without nouns and conjunctions--"Quoyle, grinning. Expected to hear they were having a kid. Already picked himself for godfather"--but her terse prose seems perfectly at home on the rocky Newfoundland coast. She is in her element both when creating haunting images (such as Quoyle's inbred, mad and mean forbears pulling their house across the ice after being ostracized by more God-fearing folk) and when lyrically rendering a routine of gray, cold days filled with cold cheeks, squidburgers, fried bologna and the sea.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 424 pages
• Publisher: Imprint unknown (July 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0754095231
• ISBN-13: 978-0754095231
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (487 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,089,259 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Annie Proulx's The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. She is the author of two other novels: Postcards, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Accordion Crimes. She has also written two collections of short stories, Heart Songs and Other Stories and Close Range. In 2001, The Shipping News was made into a major motion picture. Annie Proulx lives in Wyoming and Newfoundland.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

88 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine yarn, May 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Shipping News: A Novel (Scribner Classics) (Hardcover)

Let me state at the outset that I am a Newfoundlander. I spent the first 38 years of my life on the island, cursing and loving the fickle weather, the stark landscape and the smothering isolation.

Concurrent with life in such a place is a certain xenophobia. Part pride, part fear, it tends to rear its head when someone from "away" decides to tell us about ourselves.

Annie Proulx is a "come-from-away", an outsider who came and settled for a time in Newfoundland, then went away and brought forth "The Shipping News".

By that time I'd moved off the island, like so many of my fellow Newfoundlanders. I left by choice to pursue a career opportunity, but it was still a wrenching experience. Thousands of others have had no choice but to leave, with the collapse of the fishery and the ensuing economic hardships. For them, leaving Newfoundland is a heart-breaking decision, because their loyalty to family and to the place is as fierce as a November gale.

A few years after I heard about a curious new novel written by an American and set in Newfoundland. So I read it.

As Quoyle made his inexorable if apprehensive way to Newfoundland I found myself wondering whether I would recognize Annie Proulx's version of my native province.

Not only did I recognize it, I came to know it better. She had found the poetry of the place, the brutal indifference of sea and stone, the soft light and the muffling fog. And the voices of the people.

Not a word rang false.

"The Shipping News" is rich in atmosphere, populated by people I know. It is a work fine in its observation and true in its telling. It's what Newfoundlanders would call a "fine yarn".

69 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "You don't have the sense God gave a donut, do you?", October 29, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Shipping News (Paperback)

It's always fun to reread a novel that was a favorite ten years ago and discover that it's just as much fun the second time around. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1994, The Shipping News is set primarily in Newfoundland, the ancestral home of Quoyle, a widower from New York, and his aunt, Agnis Hamm, who return to Newfoundland with Quoyle's two young daughters to try to create new lives. Quoyle, with minimal experience as a newspaper man in New York, gets a job at the local newspaper, the Gammy Bird, at Killick Claw, recording the weekly shipping news, doing features on visiting ships, and covering local car wrecks. Agnis continues her business of upholstering ship and yacht interiors, and Quoyle's little girls settle into school and daycare.

As Quoyle and Agnis become friends with their fiercely independent and often quirky neighbors, their own pasts gradually unfold for the reader, and as they face the stark challenges of their new lives in wintery Newfoundland, they begin to understand more fully who they are and to recognize what is important in their lives. As Quoyle, who is still coming to terms with the death of his flagrantly unfaithful wife, Petal Bear, gains respect from his colleagues for his work at the paper and from his neighbors for his strength of character, he also begins to gain some self-respect. Agnis's departure from Newfoundland many years ago was the result of a terrible trauma, and upon her return she finds unique ways to put some of that trauma to rest.

Life in Killick Claw is often bleak, and its population must deal with violent storms, winters lasting six months, few connections to the outside world, and sudden death at sea, all of which Proulx describes in vivid and moving passages. But survival in this world also inspires kinship among its residents and a kind of dark-humored resignation which is even more vividly depicted. All of Proulx's characters wrest grim humor from life's tragedies, buoying their spirits (and those of the reader) as they soldier on, refusing to engage in self-pity, no matter their difficulties. As irony piles upon irony, their resilience shines through, making this novel both a story of harsh reality and one of inspiring strength. n Mary Whipple

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sense of Place and People, July 30, 2002

By 

Lawrence E. Wilson (Mayfield, East Sussex, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Shipping News (Paperback)

I just finished this--one of those novels to which I've been meaning to get to for about five years now. The story of a man named Quoyle, forced by circumstance to return to his ancestral land, writing for a small local paper...Trying to fit back in, as no outsider would be able to, learning the language of boats, local cuisine (squidburgers?!?), superstition and journalism. I really, really liked this book. A distinct narrative voice, a complex plot-matrix (nothing so simple as a plot-line), and the whole thing well and truly anchored in a place. A concrete and vivid depiction of a Newfoundland seaside town. And the quotations beginning each chapter were nice, too, mostly from The Ashley Book of Knots, with directions for tying--and by chapter's end, I picked up each knot's metaphor. I'd read Annie Proulx's short story collection, Heartsongs, and enjoyed that, too. I don't know why it took me so long to get around to this really fine novel.