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Close Range

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Close Range
Wyoming Stories  
By Annie Proulx
This edition: Hardcover, 288 pages
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Description

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 "Brokeback Mountain," the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world's violent 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 Monthly, Harper's, and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

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The New York Times Powerful...Read [the stories] for their absolute authenticity and their language, a wry poetry of loneliness and pain.
The Boston Globe 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.
People 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.
Outside magazine A major achievement in American fiction
-- a gorgeous, deeply affecting adventure in stylistic plenitude, prose clarity, and hearts laid bare.
Richard Eder The New York Times Book Review Geography, splendid and terrible, is a tutelary deity to the characters in Close Range. Their lives are futile uphill struggles conducted as a downhill, out-of-control tearaway. Proulx writes of them in a prose that is violent and impacted and mastered just at the point where, having gone all the way to the edge, it is about to go over.
Michael Knight The Wall Street Journal Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms.
Carolyn See The Washington Post Book World 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.
Michael Upchurch The Seattle Times Book Review Her characters -- stoical, hardheaded, yet willing to be ravaged by the closest available passion whenever the chance presents itself
-- crackle and cavort on the page. Served up a full array of life's wayward ecstasies and gut-twisting losses, they resign themselves, in true Proulx fashion, to the damage that loss and ecstasy do....Amen to that, and amen to this book.
Jill Vejnoska Atlanta Journal-Constitution Annie Proulx isn't easy. Little she writes about smacks of the familiar. Where so many successful authors strive to create worlds that are instantly, even comfortably, recognizable to readers, Proulx goes where few others would. It isn't easy, but Close Range is definitely worth it.
Anna Mundow New York Daily News Close Range is not one long dirge simply played in eleven different keys. Each story presents a subtle change of mood and each character inhabits a particular world, a world that Proulx constructs with graceful, devastating sentences.
Judith WynnBoston HeraldBlends harsh realism with macabre humor and a touch of the supernatural. Proulx is a masterful storyteller, engrossed by the beauty of Wyoming ranch country.
Los Angeles TimesThese 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.
Betsy WillefordThe Miami HeraldDespite the stumbling lives and untimely deaths that afflict her characters, Proulx is a pure joy to read.
Dan CryerNewsdayThe stories here speak with enormous power. They bear the authority of a writer so accomplished and so attuned to the hard-luck characters that she wrenches from their experiences with shivery, majestic beauty.
John SkowTimeProulx's language does not admit "yes, but" or "really?" When it works, which is most of the time, it sweeps aside all ideas, her own and the reader's, and allows no response except banging the hands together.
VogueThe work of a writer who casts a giant shadow over most of the competition. Proulx's prose is magisterial in force.
Walter KirnNew YorkProulx's folksy stoicism isn't a pose. Her stories are solid oak....Rustic baroque. She's a writer who does her thinking by hand, crafting sentences whose specific gravity mysteriously exceeds their size.
Elizabeth GilbertMirabellaIf you've got the guts for it, cowboy up and read this book, because it is a masterwork, terrifying and gorgeous.
Vanessa V. FriedmanEntertainment WeeklyA dazzling collection of eleven stories...the pieces meld seamlessly into each other to create a nuanced portrait of a bleak and windswept world.
Lisa SheaElleProulx 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.
Kirkus Reviews (starred)Gritty, authoritative stories of loving, losing, and bearing the consequences. Nobody else writes like this, and Proulx has never written better.
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