Close Range: Wyoming Stories [Paperback]

Pulitzer Prize-winner E. Annie Proulx forays through the underside of America's beloved Wild West in Close Range, a collection of stories about hardship and more hardship in Wyoming territory. Understanding that the West's infinite spaces tended to inspire neither introspection nor contemplation, but a violent and insatiable restlessness, Proulx's eight stories are dark reflections on the lives of a handful of characters striving to define themselves against the unforgiving landscapes. The three professional actors chosen to read the text give strong, resounding interpretations of the macabre tales. (Running time: 6 hours, 4 cassettes) --Natasha Senjanovich --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This marvelous collection proves that Proulx's Pulitzer Prize for The Shipping News was no one-shot deal. Set in Wyoming, the 11 stories "feature down-on-their-luck ranchers, cowboys, and working men who watch helplessly as the modern world leaves them behind." (LJ 5/1/99)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

A vigorous second collection from Proulx (after Heart Songs and Other Stories, 1988): eleven nicely varied stories set in the roughhewn wasteland that one narrator calls a 97,000-square-miles dog's breakfast of outside exploiters, Republican ranchers and scenery.'' The characters here are windburned, fatalistic westerners stuck in the harsh lives they've made for themselves in this bitter demi-paradise. They include: hardworking, luckless ranchers (in the painfully concise ``Job History,'' and the sprawling ``Pair a Spurs,'' the latter a wry tale of divorce, sexual urgency, and sheer cussedness that bears fleeting resemblances to Proulx's Accordion Crimes); aging hellion Josanna Skiles (of ``A Lonely Coast'') and the lover who can neither tame her nor submit to her; a sagebrush Bluebeard and his inquisitive wife (in the amusingly fragmentary ``55 Miles to the Gas Pump''); and an itinerant rodeo cowboy (in ``The Mud Below'') whose vagrant spirit stubbornly kicks against memories of his disastrous childhood. Two stories are, effectively, miniature novels: ``People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water,'' about memorably dysfunctional feuding families; and ``The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,'' which begins as a collection of random eccentricities, then coheres into a grimly funny parody of the family saga. ``The Blood Bay'' retells a familiar western folktale, adding just a whiff of Chaucer's ``Pardoner's Tale.'' And two prizewinning pieces brilliantly display Proulx's trademark whipsaw wit and raw, lusty language. ``The Half-Skinned Steer'' wrests a rich portrayal of the experience of unbelonging from the account of an old man's journey westward, for his brother's funeral, back to the embattled home he'd spent decades escaping. And the powerful ``Brokeback Mountain'' explores with plangent understated compassion the lifelong sexual love between two cowboys destined for separation, and the harsh truth that ``if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.'' Gritty, authoritative stories of loving, losing, and bearing the consequences. Nobody else writes like this, and Proulx has never written better. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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.

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.

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News 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. Her most recent book is Fine Just the Way It Is. She lives in Wyoming.

Annie Proulx shapes a story like Andrew Wyeth paints a picture: simple, clear, realistic, and stunning in its revelation. And William Dufris brings Proulx's stories to the ear with the same elegant ease, layering fine washes of tonal inflection over strong individuals and the unyielding landscape of Wyoming. Dufris misses none of the stories' flatness or emotionality, lending dignity and insight to dysfunction, love, and desperation. The relentless battering of the wind, the mysterious allure of a pair of spurs, the shame of forbidden lust come together in sometimes breathtaking blends of sound and silence. Unfortunately, the audiobook's editors have crowded the stories together, shattering the listener's sense of closure after each one. Still, Dufris's performance places Proulx's characters strongly within a sense of place. R.P.L. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine