Close Range

Wyoming Stories

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short-story collections of our time.
Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace.
These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent -- by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

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Scribner |
288 pages |
ISBN 9780684852225 |
February 2000

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Praise

“The New York Times Powerful...Read [the stories] for their absolute authenticity and their language, a wry poetry of loneliness and pain. ”

SEE ALL PRAISE (10)

“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. ”