Recommendations
Books Like Postcards by Annie Proulx
For readers of the great American flight novel
If you loved Postcards — Loyal Blood's three-decade flight across America, the postcard images of each place he passes through, the alternating portrait of the family he left behind in Vermont — these novels share the same territory: the American road as escape, the landscape as the medium of a life, and the price of running from what you did.
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Buy on AmazonThe Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's Pulitzer-winning companion novel — Quoyle's move to Newfoundland; where Postcards is about flight, The Shipping News is about arrival; both are place-rooted novels in the distinctive Proulx mode, and The Shipping News is the most accessible entry to her fiction.
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Buy on AmazonAccordion Crimes
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's third novel — the companion in her broad American landscape fiction; where Postcards follows one man across America, Accordion Crimes follows an object through multiple communities; both are comprehensive portraits of American life through non-mainstream lives.
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Buy on AmazonOn the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac's defining road novel — the companion in the American road tradition; where Kerouac's road is about freedom and possibility, Proulx's is about flight and economic necessity; both are portraits of specific American geographies in motion.
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Buy on AmazonEast of Eden
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's great American family novel — the companion in the tradition of American fiction about a landscape and the family it shapes; the Trask and Hamilton families' California is the earlier literary version of what Proulx is doing with the Blood family's Vermont and American West.
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Buy on AmazonCold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Frazier's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about a man moving across a specific landscape; Inman is moving home after a war as Loyal is moving away from home after a crime; both novels are about what the American landscape costs and gives.
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Buy on AmazonReservation Blues
by Sherman Alexie
Alexie's novel about the Spokane Indian Reservation — the companion in American fiction about people whose connection to a specific American landscape is the source of both identity and confinement; the reservation is the opposite of Loyal Blood's flight — the place you cannot leave even if you try.
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Buy on AmazonWinter's Bone
by Daniel Woodrell
Woodrell's Ozarks novel — the companion in American fiction about working-class lives shaped by specific, impoverished rural landscapes; Ree Dolly's Ozarks are the Missouri version of the Vermont and Western landscapes that Proulx's characters inhabit.
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Buy on AmazonThe Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's great Dust Bowl novel — the companion in American fiction about economic necessity and the westward road; the Joads' flight from Oklahoma to California is the earlier, more famous version of the same American economic geography that Loyal Blood crosses in Postcards.
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