Recommendations
Books Like That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx
For readers of the great Texas Panhandle novel
If you loved That Old Ace in the Hole — Bob Dollar's education in the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle, the accumulation of local history and ecology, the conflict between corporate agriculture and the communities it disrupts — these novels share the same quality: American places and communities documented with novelistic patience, and the political reality of what corporate capitalism does to specific landscapes.
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Buy on AmazonThe Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's Pulitzer-winning novel — the companion in her place-rooted fiction; where That Old Ace is the Panhandle, The Shipping News is Newfoundland; both are novels about a specific North American landscape and its effect on the people who inhabit it.
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Buy on AmazonPlainsong
by Kent Haruf
Haruf's novel about a small Colorado plains town — the companion in American plains fiction; Holt's quiet people are the gentle, lyrical version of the Panhandle communities Proulx portrays; both novelists are deeply committed to the moral and aesthetic value of ordinary American places.
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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 the Oklahoma plains under economic pressure; the Joads' Oklahoma is the Dust Bowl version of the same landscape That Old Ace in the Hole is writing about in the corporate-agriculture-era mode.
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Buy on AmazonGilead
by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about a specific small-town community's deep history; John Ames's Iowa is the gentler, more theological version of the communities Proulx is portraying in the Panhandle.
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Buy on AmazonPostcards
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's debut novel — the companion in her American landscape fiction; Loyal Blood's journey across the American plains is the road version of the same geography that Bob Dollar enters in That Old Ace in the Hole.
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Buy on AmazonA Thousand Acres
by Jane Smiley
Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about farming, landscape, and the forces that destroy agricultural communities; the Iowa farm's disintegration is the domestic version of what corporate hog farming represents in Proulx's Panhandle.
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Buy on AmazonOil!
by Upton Sinclair
Sinclair's novel about the California oil industry — the companion in the tradition of American fiction that investigates a specific extractive industry and its effect on the landscape and communities it invades; the oil fields of California are the earlier version of the corporate agriculture of the Panhandle.
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Buy on AmazonClose Range: Wyoming Stories
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's Wyoming story collection — the companion in her plains fiction; the Wyoming landscape is the cousin of the Panhandle landscape, both defined by wind, flatness, and economic pressure; reading them together shows Proulx's sustained engagement with the American plains.
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