Halifax Herald Newspaper

Bob Wilder began a 40-year award-winning career in journalism in 1950 as a sports writer in Lubbock, Tex., and retired on his 65th birthday in December 1992 as news editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press, then a New York Times-owned newspaper. After completing a hitch in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he edited newspapers in Dallas, Vicksburg, Houston, Salt Lake City, Stockton and Santa Barbara. Wilder has served as county editor and state editor of the Dallas Times Herald; city editor of the Vicksburg Post, night sports editor of the Houston Chronicle; copy editor of the Salt Lake City Tribune; and sports editor of the Stockton Record. Wilder has received the coveted Dallas Press Club reporting award, a two-state writing award at Vicksburg, and the Page One makeup award at Santa Barbara. Born in Tulsa in 1927, he now lives with his wife in Stockton, California. His appreciation for Big Band jazz has been a lifelong interest.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, "The Shipping News" is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle's Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family's unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above 70 degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it's easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the "Gammy Bird" (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents). As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph -- in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark;silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover's knot.