Bird Cloud - by Annie Proulx (Paperback)

About the Book

Bird Cloud is the name Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and 400-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. Her first work of nonfiction in more than 20 years, "Bird Cloud" is the story of designing and constructing that house--with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets.

Book Synopsis

Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of the American West landscape and building a home there by Annie Proulx, winner of a PEN/Faulker Award, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award and author of the short story "Brokeback Mountain."

"Bird Cloud" is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it--a wilderness house in harmony with her work, her appetites, and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.

Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house--with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history of wild terrain and an archaeology of the region--inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and Shoshone Indians--and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.

Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself in a memoir of solitutde, nature, land, and identity. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials, and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.

Review Quotes

"Annie Proulx has a wit as sharp as the winter winds of Wyoming."--Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

"Gorgeous descriptions... Unforgettable anecdotes."--Alexandra Fuller, New York Times Book Review

"With every word on the page, Proulx pays homage to a rugged and magnificent Wyoming place--as well as to its surroundings, history, topography, geology and animals.... Proulx shares a part of her soul with the publication of Bird Cloud.... Beautiful and profound."--Buffalo News

About the Author

Annie Proulx is the author of eleven books, including the novels The Shipping News and Barkskins, and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner Award. Her story "Brokeback Mountain," which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Fen, Bog, and Swamp is her second work of nonfiction. She lives in New Hampshire.