SOURCE: Gardam, Jane. “Rather Ordinary Horror and Hatred.” Spectator 274, no. 8698 (25 March 1995): 33–34.

In the following review of Heart Songs and Other Stories, Gardam compliments Proulx's literary skill, but finds her stories “unconsciously derivative” of earlier American writers.

I don't know what to make of E. Annie Proulx. This, her first book, is rumoured to have been found on the slush pile of her American publisher in 1988. Her first novel, Postcards, in 1991 caused a lot of excitement and won the PEN/Faulkner prize, the first time for a woman. In 1993 came The Shipping News, hailed as the great American contemporary novel of Atlantic coast life. It won every international award you can think of and then a Pulitzer prize.

And here she is now on the dust-jacket of Heart Songs, short stories published here for the first time. She looks delightfully whacky and unliterary and leans upon a stave, a...