Close Range Wyoming Stories

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 inClose Rangehave appeared inThe New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's,andGQ.They have been selected for theO. Henry Stories 1998andThe Best American Short Stories of the Centuryand have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

Annie Proulx is the author of the short-story collection Heart Songs and Other Stories and three novels: Postcards, The Shipping News, and Accordion Crimes. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner Award, she lives and writes in Wyoming.