From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, comes a masterwork: an epic, dramatic novel about the taking down of the world’s forests.
In Barkskins Annie Proulx tells, blow by axe blow, how seventeenth-century Europeans felled the wilderness, displaced the First Nations and founded the New World on timber.
Two penniless Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a seigneur, they become woodcutters – barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship and is oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He’s forced to marry a Mi’kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two cultures. Whereas Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader and sets up a timber business.
Distance & Desire
Close Range collects eleven of Proulx’s short stories, all set at various points in the previous century on the ‘dangerous and indifferent ground’ of the author’s home state of Wyoming. It is...
Read more. . . from the Trees
In Issue 75, I said some books help you grow. Others help you let go. Our son was 17 when he disappeared. I’ll call him R. We bought our place that was big enough to plant trees when he was 14....
Read moreSeeing the Wood . . .
Some books grow on you. Others help you grow. In January 1990, aged 24 and not long out of drama school, I landed a job: six months touring an Alan Ayckbourn play round secondary schools in northern...
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