Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Proulx, Annie - Loree Rackstraw (review date September 1989)

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Loree Rackstraw (review date September 1989)

SOURCE: Rackstraw, Loree. “Painful Irresolution.” North American Review 274, no. 3 (September 1989): 67–69.

[In the following excerpt, Rackstraw offers a positive assessment of Heart Songs and Other Stories.]

According to master fictionist R. V. Cassill, the short story is “a refuge for those who want to explore the human condition as sentient men and women.” This traditional view is central to recent collections of short fiction by Richard Lyons and E. Annie Proulx. Lyons's volume of ten stories [A Wilderness of Faith and Love] takes the reader on a sometimes terrifying, sometimes hilarious probing of sexual longing which verges on the metaphysical in its intense intimacy. [In Heart Songs,] Proulx invents a more poetic distance in nine stories that trade intimacy for nearly pristine simile to reveal touching and bizarre struggles of country folk. Both make vivid the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Loree Rackstraw (review date September 1989)
   2. Frederick Busch (review date 12 January 1992)
   3. William Green (review date 18 July 1993)
   4. Sandra Scofield (review date 1 August 1993)
   5. John Whitworth (review date 4 December 1993)
   6. John DeMont (review date 25 April 1994)
   7. Verlyn Klinkenborg (review date 30 May 1994)
   8. Ronald Rompkey (review date September 1994)
   9. Jane Gardam (review date 25 March 1995)
   10. B. A. St. Andrews (review date spring 1995)
   11. Ellen Akins (review date 30 April 1995)
   12. Sybil Steinberg (essay date 3 June 1996)
   13. Bharati Mukherjee (review date 9 June 1996)
   14. Ellen Akins (review date 23 June 1996)
   15. Celia McGee (review date 24 June 1996)
   16. Phoebe-Lou Adams (review date July 1996)
   17. J. Z. Grover (review date September 1996)
   18. John Sutherland (review date 7 October 1996)
   19. Caroline Moore (review date 12 October 1996)
   20. Helen Carr (review date 18 October 1996)
   21. Mark Shechner (review date winter 1997)
   22. Vicky Greenbaum (essay date December 1997)
   23. Louise Flavin (essay date spring 1999)
   24. Merle Rubin (review date 3 June 1999)
   25. Dean Bakopoulos (review date September 1999)
   26. Rita D. Jacobs (review date spring 2000)
   27. Hilary Mantel (review date 11 May 2000)
   28. Erin McGraw (review date summer 2000)
   29. John Noell Moore (review date September 2000)
   30. Michael Kowalewski (review date winter 2001)
   31. Karen L. Rood (essay date 2001)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright