Robust, often bawdy, heartwarming, and intimate, That Old Ace in the Hole tracks the vast waves of change that have shaped the American landscape and character over the past century. In leading man Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irresistible characters in contemporary fiction.

Presents eleven short stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx.

"Bird Cloud" is the name the author 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. She 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,...

From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx - whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth - comes an urgent and riveting history of wetlands, their ecological role and how the loss of them threatens the planet. Fens, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries are the earth's most desirable and dependable resources, and in four illuminating parts Proulx documents the emergence of their systemic destruction in the pursuit of profit...

Grapes are among the most desirable and best-known fruits, prized for their beauty, their succulence and varied flavors, their noble metamorphosis into wine, and their more utilitarian roles as sources of fresh juice and tasty jellies. For most growers, the triumph of harvesting fragrant clusters of dusky-bloomed grapes in rose, blue-black, amber, purple, or light red bunches is its own reward-a test of gardening skill. In Great Grapes, you'll learn...

Returning from a design and garden show in Milan, the Devil looks at Hell in disgust. The slimy rocks, the fog--all of it is passé now that environmentalists enjoy that sort of thing. Plus an expansion is needed to accomodate the amount of American businessmen on their way down. So the Devil starts redesigning Hell--complete with the St. Louis arch over the Entrance Gate and new art from the Louvre and various cathedrals.

Annie Proulx follows the success of Close Range with another remarkable collection of stories. Bad Dirt is filled with the vivid characters for which Proulx has become known. In "The Contest," the male population of Elk Tooth, Wyoming, vows to put aside their razors for two seasons, ante up ten dollars each, and wait to see who has the longest beard on July 4. Deb Sipple, the moving protagonist of "That Trickle-Down Effect," finds that his opportunism-and...

An inksetter in New York, Quoyle returns to his family's longtime home, a small fishing town in Newfoundland, with his young daughter, after a traumatizing experience with her mother, who sold her to an illegal adoption agency. Though Quoyle has had little success thus far in life, his shipping news column in the local newspaper finds an audience, and his experiences in the town begin to change his life.

First published in 1967, Thomas Savage's western novel about two brothers and the competition between them when one marries now includes an afterword by Annie Proulx.