Like a Fish Out of Water

For author E. Annie Proulx, who has lived happily in a big log house on 190 wind-swept acres in Wyoming for the last seven years, visits to Los Angeles are a vivid contrast to life in the state she’s personified in her work. In conversation, and in her writing, she speaks of Wyoming with the tenderness of an old friend. “It’s an extremely handsome place,” she said by phone from her home last week. “Quiet. Peaceful. Windy.”

“The country poured open on each side ... the empty pale place and its roaring wind ... the distant antelope as tiny as mice,” she writes in her 1999 book “From Close Range: Wyoming Stories” (Scribner).

“Then the violent country showed itself, the cliffs rearing at the moon, the snow smoking off the prairie like steam, the white flank of the ranch slashed with fence cuts, the sagebrush glittering and along the creek black tangles of willow bunched like dead hair.”

It’s a world away from the Hollywood swirl she entered when “The Shipping News,” her 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, became a film. Promotional work for the movie brought her to Beverly Hills for a few days in December, and, at one point during her trip, Proulx found herself racing around town to high-priced shoe stores looking for a suitable pair to wear to the film’s Hollywood premiere.

“That was a very different experience for me, because the stores I shop in are not purveyors of Manolo Blahniks,” said the 66-year-old writer.

Ultimately, she wore a pair of shoes she’d brought from home.

Yet another odd point in the trip took place during her talks with reporters. “I discovered that interviewers were bitterly disappointed that I liked [the film],” she said. “There is kind of a tradition, if you’re a writer, that you’re supposed to hate what is done to [the novel with] the film. I found myself in the extremely weird position of saying: ‘No. I really liked it.’ It was quite silly.”

The world of literature, not film, will draw Proulx back to Los Angeles on April 25, a second trip in four months and a rarity, she said, since “I usually get there once every few years.” Proulx will be in town to speak at UCLA with Jack Miles, author of the Pulitzer-winning “God: A Biography” (Knopf, 1995). (Her appearance is part of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.)

Two weeks ago, she finished a new book titled “That Old Ace in the Hole,” which is set in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and due out early next year.

“In part, it’s connected with my study of the exploration of the West,” she said. “In the course of travels of 20 years I’ve crisscrossed that part of the country frequently and I rather liked it.... Most people find it unpleasant ... [but] it occurred to me that a place that has so many things not going for it would be a good place to write about.”

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Is Stallone’s Mom Following His Lead?

Sylvester Stallone’s mother, Jacqueline, is gunning for a matchup on the new Fox TV series “Celebrity Boxing.” In March, producers of the new program pitted Paula Jones against Tonya Harding. Network sources told The Times last week that the next pairing could be Joey Buttafuoco and John Wayne Bobbitt.

Jacqueline Stallone, an astrologer who’s in her 70s, says she’s calling some of her celebrity peers to pitch a matchup. Her top picks, she says, are Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt, Tammy Faye Bakker and Zsa Zsa Gabor. If they’re not interested, she says: “What I’d like to do is go a round with my lawyer and knock him out....We can get Phyllis Diller and Liz Taylor. Let people take bets on who’s going to win. The winner always gets a chance to slug another celebrity. You’d be surprised. Everyone has a secret desire to sock someone on the nose.”

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‘Cold Mountain’ Author Scores Big

Author Charles Frazier reportedly received an $8-million advance for his next book, after submitting a one-page proposal, according to the BBC and Newsweek. After a bidding war, Random House won the rights for the as-yet-untitled book. Producer Scott Rudin secured the movie rights for more than $3 million. Like Frazier’s previous novel, the bestselling “Cold Mountain,” it’s set during the Civil War.

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Sightings

Jennifer Love Hewitt wearing pink leg warmers over black leggings with a long black dress at Ed Debevic’s, where Glamour magazine threw its annual Don’t party celebrating bad fashion Thursday night.

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City of Angles runs Tuesday through Friday. E-mail: angles@latimes.com.