Close Range - by Annie Proulx (Paperback)

About the Book

From one of the great writers of our time comes a collection of award-winning stories about loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Her masterful language and vast love of the West are evident in these stunning portraits which have appeared in "The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly" and "Harper's."

Book Synopsis

Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Barkskins, showcases her "gritty and gleaming" (The New York Times Book Review) writing in Close Range, one of the most celebrated story collections of all time--includes "Brokeback Mountain."

Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below," a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer," an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home. In the iconic story "Brokeback Mountain," the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world's intolerance.

These are stories of desperation, hard times, and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes--confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty--with the more benign values of the new west.

Stories in Close Range have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998, The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

Review Quotes

"Powerful... Read the stories for their absolute authenticity and their language, a wry poetry of loneliness and pain." --The New York Times

"Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms." --The Wall Street Journal

"Few writers feel equally at home in the novel and the short story... these stories are tough as flint and on occasion breathtaking; together they stand with Proulx's best work." --The Boston Globe

"As she rips away our romantic notions of the West, Proulx asks how capable any of us are of outrunning our origins. Her fatalistic answer, in these stories, adds up to some breathtaking reading." --People

"It's the prose, as much as the inventiveness of the stories here, that shines and shines. Every single sentence surprises and delights and just bowls you over." --The Washington Post Book World

"These Wyoming stories require all five senses. And when you finally rest, your knuckles perhaps bloodied, you see in these stories a life that is fragile and subtle, much like cactuses and desert flowers." --Los Angeles Times

"The work of a writer who casts a giant shadow over most of the competition. Proulx's prose is magisterial in force." --Vogue

"Proulx has written to barbed perfection about the wasted, wanton, often violent characters whose ties to the land form the preternatural heart of these spine-tingling stories." --Elle

"A major achievement in American fiction--a gorgeous, deeply affecting adventure in stylistic plenitude, prose clarity, and hearts laid bare." --Outside

About the Author

Annie Proulx is the author of eleven books, including the novels The Shipping News and Barkskins, and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner Award. Her story "Brokeback Mountain," which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Fen, Bog, and Swamp is her second work of nonfiction. She lives in New Hampshire.