Annie Proulx with Michael Cunningham: Stories

Overview

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Barkskins joins us for a reading and conversation celebrating the launch of Annie Proulx Stories: New and Selected, a landmark collection that gathers together the full breadth of her extraordinary short fiction.

Over the last four decades, few writers have expanded the horizons of the literature of the American West as profoundly as Annie Proulx. In “gritty and gleaming stories” (The New York Times Book Review), Proulx’s short fiction explores lives marked by solitude, violence, endurance, desire, the wrong kinds of love, and unexpected grace. Her characters — cowboys, ranchers, drifters, laborers, and outsiders — navigate harsh landscapes and harder emotional terrain, revealing the complicated bonds between people and the land itself.

Gathering three brand new stories with contemporary classics like “The Half-Skinned Steer,” “The Mud Below,” and the groundbreaking queer love story “Brokeback Mountain” — adapted into Ang Lee’s Academy Award-winning film — the publication of Proulx’s collected short fiction is an event in American literature.

In an evening celebrating the breadth of her extraordinary career, hear Proulx reflect on the evolution of her work across decades, the enduring art of the short story, and her creation of a new emotional landscape in the American West.

“When I first read ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Annie Proulx’s seminal short story about gay cowboys in love, I wondered how I might carry it with me forever.” — Michael Cunningham