SOURCE: Akins, Ellen. “Before The Shipping News.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (30 April 1995): 2, 11.

In the following review, Akins offers a generally positive assessment of Heart Songs and Other Stories, noting that Proulx's prose is “often inspired.”

If you want to meet someone named John or Mary or David, who has good teeth (or at least most of them), a decent haircut and low body fat, who'd rather sit on a toilet than piss off the porch, who might walk in the woods without taking a gun, who uses deodorant and has a fair grasp of standard English, then don't come in. If, on the other hand, you're looking for Netta or Albina or Albro, Eno or Snipe or Leverd, and you like 'em battered and broke and unbathed, this is the book for you. It's not pretty: “Some kind of subject,” as the rare outsider says in one...