Close Range : Wyoming Stories

Close Range is a collection of eleven short stories from the short fiction master, Annie Proulx. As usual for Proulx, and as the title suggests, we get stories of people toughing it out in Wyoming, farming, bull riding, surviving. Proulx is adept at short fiction because she can paint characters and plot with quick brush strokes. But where she really shines is with her unique descriptions of landscape. "The country appeared as empty ground, big sagebrush, rabbit brush, intricate sky, flocks of small birds like packs of cards thrown up in the air, and a faint track drifting toward the red-walled horizon. Graves were unmarked, fallen house timbers and corrals burned up in old campfires. Nothing much but weather and distance, the distance punctuated once in a while by ranch gates, and to the north the endless murmur and sun-flash of semis rolling along the interstate." These are the words that start "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World", but they are representative of the whole work. Landscape is especially important given the common theme, and Proulx fills the stories with descriptions that show both the isolation and desolation of the land, as well as its large and unrelenting beauty.

I particularly loved the stories "The Mud Below" and "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water", but the real gem here is "Brokeback Mountain". It's cliché to say the book is better than the movie, but it is a cliché because it is often true, and it is true here. There is something about this stark story of two cowboys who fall in love that lends itself to short fiction. Also, while movies often easily draw social issues towards them like a magnet, the story here can just be what it is, a story of impossible love. It is quite possibly the most moving short story I have ever read.

I highly recommend this collection.

After reading anything written by Annie Proulx, whether a full-fledged novel or short story, it is no wonder that she is a prize winning author. Her ability to craft stories both strange and familiar that captivate the reader's soul is a remarkable gift. "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" is famous in that it is the collection that contains 'Brokeback Mountain', but there are other stories in the collection that are just as deserving of praise and recognition.

While the reader may not be familiar with Wyoming or the ranching way of life, Proulx manages to make the reader feel automatically at home. It is in her simple yet poetic way of showing the yearnings and loneliness that everyone feels that makes these stories and their characters come alive. A few of the stories, such as 'The Half-Skinned Steer' and 'The Blood Bay' are reworkings of common tales and myths, quickly told but long-lasting in terms of imagery. One of my favorite stories in the collection is 'People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water', a tale of two families and their tribulations and an ending that stings. Other favorites are 'The Bunchgrass Edge of the World' and 'A Lonely Coast', two stories about the women of Wyoming rather than the men, that depict a harsh loneliness underlying their hopes and dreams. And of course, the signature story, 'Brokeback Mountain', a thorough and unflinching portrait of a love that could not be, beautifully told and impossible to forget. For all its controversy, it truly is a universal tale.

Annie Proulx is an incredibly talented writer, able to bring to vivid life the starkest of realities. Her characters are not heroes, and neither are they all likeable, but even the minor ones are fully formed and live on after they have exited the story. It is hard to put this collection of stories down; each one, no matter how short or bizarre, leaves an indelible and haunting impression. These stories have life.

Annie Proulx supplies interesting subjectivity in extreme and/or interesting environments. Initially reader response to her work was favorable. Recently critical response seem to have fallen, (every interesting new writer cannot remain a new writer forever), but encountering this collection the reader is struck immediately by the liveliness of the writing. One knows that the anticipated enjoyment will pan out.

Does a son go to a bullriding school in California just to spite his mother? She feels that, with all of her hard work of raising him, betrayed. Two years later Diamond sits with his younger brother at the kitchen table. He tells his younger brother rodeo is like a magic show.

A man works on the range near Laramie. He saves. Next he sends for his family. He stakes a homestead claim. The Tinsleys are less lucky than the Dunmires. There is some terrible misery in store for the Tinsleys.

Aladdin has three children. One, an overweight girl, stays home and works on the ranch. She thinks the tractor is speaking. She marries the son of the cattle dealer. Aladdin crashes his new plane.

Someone asserts that half of the hands in Wyoming are women. Bison, it seems, are half the trouble of cattle. Later the lands are sold. It is supposed to revert to the state of nature. Someone runs a lodge for Japanese tourists.

'Brokeback Mountain' is in this collection. Ennis and Jack have signed up with Farm and Ranch Employment. They are herder and camp tender near Signal. The summer range is National Forest land on Brokeback Mountain. Yes, indeed, the story has cinematic features.

Proulx is unique.

The stories in Close Range are diverse and often grim. Buried within the grimness is a dry humor best exposed in "The Blood Bay" -- about a cowboy who finds a pair boots in the bitter Wyoming winter. "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" is about a failing ranch family and their overweight daughter's quest to find a man. One of her suitors is a broke-down & vengeful tractor. On the grimmer side is "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," a story about a two families and the tragedy that strikes a member of one of them: Rasmussen, who gets mangled in a car wreck and returns home (brain damaged and scarred)to be taken care of by his parents. I read this while vacationing in Wyoming. At first, I thought that while the stories were brilliantly written, the characters she writes about surely couldn't exist. Then, as I drove through some of the places she wrote of & saw the people who lived there eating in small diners or driving by in battered pick up trucks, I understood that I was mistaken. These characters are alive & living in a world quite alien from the city life most of us know. Her language draws us into the world of red hoodoos, sagebrush, and winter storms where struggling alchoholic ranchers eek out a living while their children flee to cities and become vegetarians only to be replaced by Californians who move to Wyoming to live "the simple life." It's a hard and bitter world in which her characters inhabit, moving about it not realizing that they are ghosts and that the world has passed them by. Her knowledge of language and farm life is both astounding and at times frightening. This is what writing should be.

After reading a couple of stories of Annie Proulx's collection "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" I started feeling the line that kept the narrative together was the familiar feeling. But near the end, when I reached a tale called "The Governors of Wyoming", I realized that they are also about ranching.
At a point in this very same story, a character states that "the main thing about ranching (...), last as long as you can, make things come out so's it's still your ranch when it is time to get buried. That's my take on it". This statement is clear what keeps all the stories together in this collection. In a way, or another, the main characters --and the main plot of narrative-- are dealing with forces --be them another person, destiny etc-- that are trying to steal their ranch.
However, the family ties are another acting force --that may help to keep the ranch or lose it. There are always conflicts between siblings, husband and wives, mothers and sons. And another major theme is the intolerance that is all around us most of the time.
This theme is the main object in the last --and probably the best --story, called "Brokeback Mountain" that narrates the relationship between to male cowboys that fall in love with each other. Due to their inhospitable environment their affair is fated to surrender. But if this is not a surprise, the dignity and beauty with Proulx deals with the characters that is an amazing thing.
The stories have different objectives and paces. Take "Job History" for instance. It is so fast that sometimes looks like a newsreel. And so it could be, because it is the story of members of a family that are so busy with their own lives that they end up missing the history that is happening in their times. And it --history -- is interfering in their lives more than they realize or wanted to. Contrary to "Mountain" this is a very fast narrative.
Each story has its own appeal and is dealt in a different way. "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" stars like a regular one, but when its touches of surrealism begins, it becomes something very unusual, and one of the best of the collection.
Much more accessible than Proulx's Pulitzer and National Book Prize winner "The Shipping News", "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" is a real treat to readers who like a sophisticated prose, written with heart, soul and smartness. It reads like Cormac McCarthy's best.
Like most anthologies it is not easy to keep a high level all the time --but the writer succeeds most of the time. Of course, there are stories that I like better than other ones, but, as whole, I think the book is so good that it is impossible not to give it my highest recommendations.

Eleven stories set in the harsh cowboy world of Wyoming: failing ranches, their owners going down with them, hard drinking, sleeping around. The loneliness - a young girl befriends a tractor in her solitude on her parents' ranch. The glamour and the pain of a rodeo star. A couple of folk tales about livestock. And behind it all the bleakness and cold:

'Ten days before June a blizzard caromed over the plains, drifting house-high on lee slopes, dragging a train of arctic air that froze the wet snow, encased new calves in icy shells'
Not a book to read in one go - I interspersed it with something totally different - but a brilliant read that brings the world of the cowboy to life.
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This collection of Annie Proulx's short stories is so good I had to keep putting it down, bowled over by the genius of her prose and the virtuoso evocation of places and people hanging on to a bitter living way out beyond the end of their luck. For me it now replaces 'The Shipping News' as Proulx's best work.
Although many of the stories are just as macabre, the characters in 'Close Range' have far less of a sense of inevitability to their lives than those in 'Accordian Crimes'. For my money the most frightening story is also the shortest in the collection, the gruesome tale of how people at the end of the earth 'make their own entertainment'.
My favourite story of the lot has to be 'Brokeback Mountain', which is the most poignant piece of prose I've read. However, perhaps you have to read the others first to gain this effect - as tragedy piles on tragedy, the poignancy mounts until it is almost too much to bear, but certainly too gripping to leave alone.
All in all this collection makes a hugely significant contribution to the genre of 'anti-western', which of course breathes new life into the 'western' myth. Proulx mythologises Wyoming even as she excoriates it. In ancient Greek tragedy, it was the gods who condemned feeble humanity to their evil fate. In 'Close Range', Proulx lets the landscape do their work for them. And unlike Greek tragedy, in 'Close Range' an intensely humane sense of humour is never far below the surface.

Everything you ever wanted to know about a cowboy life and more. A book of short stories covering different periods in the twentieth century. I enjoyed this beautifully written book so much, yet I largely found it very sad and depressing.
Some of the stories literally race in breathtaking fashion through miserable lives, it is dark sad, frightening, depressing and so very real. Some stories take their time building up lives that had rare moment of happiness, but ultimately were largely sad. There is so much suffering in this book, so much blood and so much agony.
In many respects this book is so very similar to Accordion Crimes. As always, thoroughly researched, AP must have spent her time in Wyoming reading everything that was ever written on rodeo life, horses and horse farms. The very well researched background material coupled with Proulx's creative character building and gifted story telling along with her mastery of the words makes for a great book that causes so much reflection.
I don't mean to put anybody off this great book, but be warned this is not a book about the "triumph of the human spirit."

Annie Proulx is an expert on the extremes of both human and meterological behavior; she knows how weather and topography can both kill people physically and warp them mentally. The stories in "Close Range" demonstrate, in finely honed sentences that sting like scorpions' tails, the danger of living in an unforgiving landscape and of trying to deny the power of land and weather. "The Half-Skinned Steer" is a brilliant, semi-surreal parable of an old man who thinks he has risen above his roots; "The Mud Below" is a remarkable character study, finding deep sympathy for a young bullrider who is slowly, shockingly revealed to be pathological. My own favorite is the final story, "Brokeback Mountain," perhaps the saddest, most moving love story ever written. Be warned that Annie Proulx does not write for sentimentalists; she is even more ruthless than Larry McMurtry in sacrificing lovable characters, probing the stupidity and meanness of humanity, and above all depicting the sheer pitilessness of the Western landscape. But for those who come prepared, she will take your breath away. The hardcover version is worth buying for the masterful illustrations of William Matthews, which depict the Wyoming mountains as Edward Hopper might have painted them.

I write and publish short stories and I teach writing.
This is one of the best collections of short stories I have ever read. I give this book to friends who write literary fiction. If I were rich enough I would make sure one of these books was in every library. When history rolls over it, it will be known as a great one.

I have spent time in the inner mountain west she writes from and have spent more time with near and dear and others in my life from that area and going back and forth. This is the real deal, nothing but the real deal, solid, real, gritty, honest, nothing but the truth.

This book touched me both as a writer and a reader and as a person. Despite the craft and envy and analysis my poor overeducated brain constantly subjects this poor book to, when I read it I am always touched as a person. I left the last story with tears in my cynical past middle-aged, Marxist eyes.
[Added several years later, that last story is named Broke Back Mountain. I think someone made a film out of it]

I wish they had a special 45 star category, because that is where the book belongs.

Brothers Grimm dealt in folklore, myth and truth using language that confronted, that did not hide, say, an act of cannibalism, and revealed in their stories some of our fears, hopes and dreams. Ms Proulx has, in CLOSE RANGE, created a language that reflects the nature of the characters who inhabit this landscape, a language which is cryptic, dense, and evocative and does not hide, say, an act of love between two men. The language is a triumph, sweeping the reader along in its power, immersing the reader in the world of the rancher, cowhand, rodeo riders and sheepherders, their search for love, for money, their recognition of meaning through their work, in a landscape more of a hell than an El Dorado. She can sum a character up in a sentence and there is more than a little humour in the hundreds of proper nouns which sparkle and colour her stories - people like Car, Skipper, Cake, Freeze, Hulse, Haul, and Wrench; places like Brokeback, Fiddle and Bow, Slope, Casper. Vivid characterisations - Mrs Freeze and Ottaline are especially memorable but so are Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar. Issues such as the transformation of the west through tourism and corporate ownership make the stories resonate and the metaphor of the lumbering Cadillac slumping off into a ditch at night in the snow in minus 10 degrees weather may say more about modern man and nature than the collected works of many others.
There is magic at work here, no less than there is in the works of Brothers Grimm, but there's much more too.

Annie Proulx, with her brilliant use of language, can pull a reader into a world so alien to the everyday that it seems unearthly. And so she does in this startlingly harsh, edgy collection of stories about cowboys and ranchers and rodeo riders and all the cliches of the "Wild West." But there's nothing of the cliche in "Wyoming Stories."

Here, the people are as gritty, bloody and stark as the land and livestock that surround them. There is nothing of the Hollywood cowboy, nothing of romance and sweet moral tales. This is reality, and there is nowhere to hide.

Each story is a world unto itself, an unflinching glimpse of an impossibly wild country where those who survive must learn to live with pain and anguish and loss. "Brokeback Mountain" is the last story, as moving, unflinching and ultimately tragic as the rest. I'm glad I read it before seeing the movie, because its ambience is lodged permanently within me. Take it from me: this is no fantasy, and not at all what homophobes might think it is.

A complete work of genius. I recommend this collection to anyone who cherishes the written word.

Ever since she allowed a happy ending to ruin things in The Shipping News, Annie Proulx has made life miserable for every character she's drawn. If she has an impulse to evoke sympathy for any of them, she conquers it. I present as evidence Accordion Crimes and Close Range. Nothing good happens in these stories except the passing of time and even the passing of time fails to change anything. At the finish of "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," she writes, "That was all sixty years ago and more. Those hards days are finished. ... We are in a new millenium and such desparate things no longer happen." Then she rams home the final line: "If you believe that you'll believe anything."
It takes a lot of work to find contrast within any one of these stories. For instance, the first image in "A Lonely Coast" is of a house burning up out on the vast Wyoming plains at night: "And you might think about the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don't give a damn. They are too far away, like everything else." From that happy beginning, the story goes on for 18 pages describing several tiny, confined lives that run together like brown and blue paint, with no logic except gravity; then, bingo, the story ends with an absurd shootout on a highway.
The thing about Annie Proulx is her imagery. For example, from "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World":
"Aladdin, face like shield, curly hair springing, tipped his head toward the tablecloth, mumbled, 'O bless this food.' Heavy beef slices, encircled by a chain of parsnips and boiled potatoes, slumped on the platter."
That is beautiful, how Aladdin tips his head, not toward the platters, the table, the food---no! Toward the tablecloth! That is poetry.
Also, as you can see throughout these stories, she connects clauses with commas but with no conjunctions; for example, "Another mudholed lane took him into a traffic circle of commuters sucking coffee from insulated cups, pastries sliding on dashboards. Halfway around the hoop he spied the interstate entrance ramp, veered for it, collided with a panel truck emblazoned STOP SMOKING! HYPNOSIS THAT WORKS!, was rammed from behind by a stretch limo, the limo in its turn rear-ended by a yawning hydroblast operator in a company pickup."
Never mind the string of clauses with no conjunctions, what about the last driver? He's yawning, he's a hydroblast operator, he's in the company pickup! That's why I keep reading this depressing stuff of hers, because of the magic show. Who else would have conjured up a yawning hydroblast operator? What's a hydroblast?

I decided to check out Close Range: Wyoming Stories on the recommendation from Stephen King in his memoir, On Writing. I'd heard good things about the author, Annie Proulx, and wanted to read her work in order to better myself as a writer. I was totally unfamiliar with any of her writings, so I must say I was more than pleasantly surprised when I found myself absolutely riveted by her short stories.

I didn't think I was a fan of stories about Wyoming and ranchers, but Proulx didn't seem to care. Each and every story in this collection drew me in and fascinated me. As clichéd as it sounds, her characters are truly masterful. Like in the land of the living, they are all flawed; they made terrible mistakes, and then they had to learn to live (and die) with the repercussions. Her characters defy stereotyping, though they all had one thing in common--they were tough. Each and every one of them was a product of the land they lived on, and so they had to be tough if they were to survive. Some were tougher than others, and some survived better than others.

Close Range worked for me because it disturbed me. I don't mean that in a negative way at all. I mean that these stories stayed with me long after I read them. They almost haunted me. They reminded me just how glorious and monstrous it is to be human, especially when you have to work yourself to the bone in order to endure.

Though Proulx has an unorthodox writing style that can sometimes be a little difficult to read, I find her completely in touch with what it is to be a human being and her realistic depiction of such, especially of those living on the ranches of Wyoming, is the work of a person who truly has an adroit grasp on her craft.

~Scott William Foley, author of The Imagination's Provocation: Volume II: A Collection of Short Stories

Annie Proulx is a wonder. Her stark and spare tales of Wyoming mark her as one of the great American literary voices. Her ear for the speech rhythms and life rhythms of her subjects is just extraordinary. Listening to her tales on cassette was a spell-binding experience. Proulx's style is two parts poetry, one part Twilight Zone and one part whisky drunk alone on a snowy hillside.

Proulx's tales tend toward the grotesque. Her heroes and heroines are plain and pathetic, but Proulx's narrative power brings the very core of their being to light. From the college-bred boy who turns bullrider, to the overweight girl who talks to tractors, to the odd passel of losers who drug, fight and drink too much for their own good, the characters exude the loneliness, bravado and inner pain of the windswept and forbidding Wyoming landscape.

I listened to the audio book mostly to hear the original "Brokeback Mountain" short story. Oddly, that tale is the least descriptive of the collection. Whether due to an inability to plumb the souls of Jack and Ennis, or simply as an echo of their own constricted, fearful personalities, "Brokeback" was more about the spaces in the narrative--the story not told--than its details. Spare as it was, though, I needed to hear it again, hoping to tease out a tiny clue to these enigmatic characters.

An extraordinary collection of short stories from a superb writer whose ability to inhabit the mind of man or woman is uncanny.

Annie Proulx is that rarity: a born short story writer. Many of the stories in Close Range" measure up to anything in the cannon of American literature and overpass most of what is considered great. "The Mud Below" deserves to find its way into every best of the best anthology from here on out. Her feeling for Wyoming (and by extension America) is complete and utterly true. Her genius with metaphor is original yet absolutely accurate. These stories are all electrifyingly honest and the characters in them are people we tend to overlook (at least literary writers do when they are not sentimentalizing them). Proulx gets her people with such uncanny accuracy that they seem more real to me than I do to myself. She's a wonderful writer. Anyone truly interested in Literature must not miss these stories. They are the first thing worthy of the word I have seen for a blue moon. Proulx is the real thing.

This book of short stories centered in or around Wyoming is about half great but really half bad. I only found 3 of the 11 works worth reading though I forced myself to read them all. It sort of shocks me that a writer of Proulx's stature and talent could not inspire me to love the great state of Wyoming....not even close.

This book is filled with stories written with intelligence but most never quite grasp the reader with their meaning. The pages are mostly just an endless descriptionary of tumbleweeds, thin lipped, stubble faced and leathery people with no dreams and no hope. The wind blows a lot and the only thing that survives much is cows and alcohol. It was simply frustrating to me to have to read one whole page about how a tumbleweed crosses the road....very slowly! The people in the majority of the short works are severely depressing souls without much as far as character, integrity or redeeming value so I found my mind a wanderin'. Maybe I'll try Montana next time.

Proulx has a few shining stars in this book that redeem her writing and imagination, thankfully. "The Half-Skinned Steer" is a shocking look at ranch life that flows well enough. "A Lonely Coast" provides a glimpse into what it's like to love a cowboy and yet never know where you stand. The best quote comes from "Pair a Spurs": "Men had that flaw in them, Inez thought, to go over the cliff of events and fall precipitously into moral sin." (Page 165). But by far the best aspect of this book stems from Proulx's wonderful story, "Brokeback Mountain," which is probably one of the greatest short stories ever written, and now amazingly well adapted for the movie screen.

I imagine Wyoming must hold something more to its mystery than dead and dying things. I imagine it to be a place of great splendor and vast emptiness but compared to complicated urban sprawl it must be magnificent and I wish Annie Proulx had captured a sense of this next to the harshness of the state. The stories in this book beg to be written simply rather than overly educated with their big words and thousands of descriptions. An ole cowboy wouldn't be sayin' words that can only be found in an Ivy League thesaurus so maybe that's why I felt out of range with the stories in this book.

I was UNDERWHELMED by "The Shipping News," while at the same time I couldn't put it down. My mother had the same reaction. "I can't figure out why I ever finished this book about such weird people," she said when she sent it to me. We both agreed we'd hated it.

After this experience, I only picked up "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" because of the last story, "Brokeback Mountain," and the controversy due both to the subject matter and from the film currently being shot by Ang Lee, starring two Hollywood "Pretty Boys" Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.

After reading these stories, I think I get it.

Proulx is a master of the short story. The short, spare sentences rapidly flesh out characters and a correspondingly spare and beautiful landscape, without becoming bogged down in the endless, bleak exposition that filled most of "The Shipping News."

In the context of the short story, where Proulx doesn't have a novel's luxury of pages, her prose becomes economic rather than self-indulgent, setting tone and describing the characters and the life in the high altitudes of Wyoming with the deadly accuracy of a keen blade.

There's not a lot of laughs in Proulx's books, and the juxtaposion of the characters' hard, cruel and bleak lives with the unforgiving Wyoming landscape is nothing short of devastating. But, unlike "The Shipping News," it works here. The stories start with a bang with "The Half-Skinned Steer," an unrelenting look at a man who's been chewed up and spit out by his early years in Wyoming, coming to an ironic end in a snowstorm a few miles from the ranch he's returning to for a funeral. Proulx builds to a climax through the stories with tales of characters suffused with regret, loss, and the will to go on living despite cruel, painful lives. The final story, "Brokeback Mountain," is the tale of two uneducated cowboys who meet and fall in love during a harsh summer of sheepherding in 1963, and how their love and lives fail them over the next 20 years, finally ending with the inevitable tragic conclusion...yet painting a bittersweet picture of survival in the face of a time and landscape that spawned the murder of Matthew Shepard.

Again, devastating. This story made me cry for the first time in 25 years, every time I read it.

These stories are not for the faint of heart, but if you can handle them, you will find yourself dwelling on them for months, when you have a minute and your day is quiet.

Extremely highly recommended, and not nearly as depressing as it sounds. And by the way, I can't wait for the film of "Brokeback Mountain."

Besides the famed "Brokeback Mountain," Annie Proulx has provided a wide assortment of stories with a theme: The untamed West is still alive and kicking like a bronco in modern Wyoming. With rough characters and circumstances that come in like a Cheyenne wind, Proulx gives us a myriad of tough lives that are reminiscent of Flannery O'Conner and Joyce Carol Oates. Which is not to say her work isn't thoroughly original. On the contrary, her spare, yet complete writing has only her signature. There's little sentimentality in her work, but the results and details are absorbing throughout. So accomplished is her symphony in desperation that commenting on individual stories should be labeled favorites, rather than best. Rodeo riders, meth addicts, dirty old men, and, of course, Ennis and Jack, spring to life in detailed adventure. Gifted.

The people who wrote that this book didn't capture Westerners correctly should return to reading Lonesome Dove. In the same way that not all Easterners are stuck up, greedy, shallow workaholics, not all Westerners are laid-back, generous, kind, tree-hugging environmentalists with a touch of rancher. I've thoroughly enjoyed reading these stories, and have found myself repeating the premises to others and reading passages aloud to my friends. Proulx has the courage to write about things that stir emotions - good - bad - ugly - ridiculous, and thank goodness we live in a country that publishes things that don't always have the formulaic high gloss sparkle on the tooth of a cowboy in a white hat. I have the hardcover with William Mathews' watercolors embedded in the book. They're beatifully rendered. This book is a collector's item as well as a great palatte cleanser.

Annie Proulx is enjoyable to read, a first-class story teller. She develops her own rythmn in the constructive way her sentences play out. I found myself re-reading a paragraph again to get a second jolt of its beauty and suddenness. Like biting into your favorite sandwich, the anxiety waiting for what is to follow, the expectations of upcoming satisfaction and delight.

We find in this book of 11 stories of diverse subjects of life in Wyoming sometimes shocking, sometimes humorous and always entertaining. I found two cowboys having sex with each other in Brokeback Mountain a stretch after watching rugged years of Randolf Scott, John Wayne, and Sam Elliott get the bad guy, drive the herd and end up with the girl at the end. The humor of the feet in the boots in The Blood Bay was a grabber for an ending to that story. The Half-Skinned Steer is an original entertaining story I also enjoyed.

Close Range is a book worth the time if you like well written western stories with a different flair.

Charles Hamilton Sr, Former Executive Director Northwest Teen Challenge and author of A Step Of Faith and From Darkness To Light.

From Darkness To Light

Annie Proulx has been my favorite author ever since I read The Shipping News for the first time back in '93. Close Range showcases her gift for language and love of landscape. "The Mud Below" and "the Bunchgrass Edge of the World" were two favorites. In Mud, the rodeo life is vividly captured, interweved with the struggle of a single mom to raise her son. In Bunchgrass, the main character, a large, big-hearted girl, is the "embarassment of the family". As the story unfolds, Proulx utilizes an interesting talking tractor (!) and that wide open Wyoming landscape to tell the story of the big girl's lonliness and struggle to find a place in the world. Other stories, such as the well-praised "The Half-Skinned Steer" and "BrokenBack Mountain" highlight diverse themes and vivid characters. Proulx's writing is funny, intense, surprising, fresh and sometimes carries underlying environmental conservation themes. I've read all of her books and short stories. The more I read of her writings, the more I appreciate her literary reach, language and content.

Masterful storytelling about a harsh land and strong characters who inhabit it. I think you have to love a land, and a people, to write about them so honestly and with such heart. As I finished each story, I felt the urge to stomp the mud from my (nonexistent) boots and brush the dust from my pants before surfacing into the light of my city life. Just one title that kept me turning the pages: "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water." I don't keep many books, preferring to pass them along to another life in the hands of other readers, but this one gets a spot on my bookshelf.

Having grown up in Wyoming, this book is about the rather unique Western characters out there in this rugged land. Most of the people I met out there were not like this at all. They're pretty much like the rest of America in all the other parts I've lived.
Proux capitalizes on that segment of Wyoming which is like that unbroken horse, never ridden, never will. Free and gritty and rugged with not much polish or class, like the many faceted wilderness that comprises this vast and diverse state.
I especially liked her story "The Mud Below." Reminded me of some characters at college who were like this, except that weren't quite so crass or naive as she has this brave, little bull rider.
Unique, well crafted stories which captivate the mind and entertain greatly. A truly unique and talented story teller. To be read and enjoyed.

What a realistic picture of so many issues of life as it really is in the harsh environment of a western state which offers few opportunities to its citizens. I'm struck by Prolux's ability to capture local ways of speaking, both in this set of short stories united by Wyoming life and in her novel,The Shipping News, a good picture of life in an East Coast state. Both styles of speaking are quite distinct but very true to local speech patterns. The stories of, Close Range are a successful picture of the life and issues of ordinary folk - real people with real problems. Bravo!

A short story collection that sure deserve attention. First of all, the writing is absolutely impressive. It takes you to Wyoming, takes you there pretty close, beneath an open sky of all possible colors and hard, sunburned land that turn's into dust, when your boots hit it. The stories are refreshingly weird (in a positive way, understood?!), grabbing the reader by his collor and tearing him out of everyday life .... Her [Annie Proulx's] work is a gift. Reading a pleasure, time spent in a purpose, like "the path is the destination". Mighty good read with a literary quality to it that makes your heart pound take up a step and your eyes moving faster over the pages, anxious to devour them. Howdy.

This is a tremendous collection of stories. The prose is magnificent; Proulx continuously finds new ways to say common things (my favorite: "his mouth seems to have been cut with a single chisel blow into easy flesh"). What's more, as amazing as the prose is, Proulx is just as concerned with story (a concern too often lost among contemporary writers); these stories rock with happening! Standouts: "Brokeback Mountain" (a frank glance into doomed cowboy love); "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Ice Water" (poetic in its depiction of the brutality of life); "55 Miles to the Gas Pump" (probably the shortest serial killer story ever told). Proulx's stories deal with the harshness that is contemporary life -- but always with an edge of humor, a touch of the whimsical (a sort of Ray Carver in Big Country). All are excellent, deserving of your reading list.

Indelible characters in gripping stories that feel like real life. (Interestingly, the men are more fully fleshed out than the wome.)
Vivid descriptions of the snowy night roads and mountain trails and wind of the mountain West and Great Plains.
These stories (except the one joke story) have none of the formal constraints or preciousness that infects all but the best short stories by the best authors.
Bet you can't read just one!

Of the stories in this collection, the upcoming movie has spotlighted the story "Brokeback Mountain." And make no mistake, it's a superior story in an excellent collection. The emotional hook to Brokeback is definitely compelling and will stick with you for a very long time.

I would avoid the stand-alone copy, however, and purchase it as part of this collection, since it includes my favorite story, "The Half-Skinned Steer." From the first paragraph, this story pulled me in, and didn't let go as Mero and the reader get closer and closer to Wyoming. Mero's story converges with the gruesome tale of Tin Head and the steer in a final scene that continues to crop up in some of my weirder dreams.

Other notable stories for me were "The Mud Below," a compelling look at a town kid who becomes a rodeo rider, and the surreal "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World," with Ottaline and her evil talking tractor.

This is one of my favorite short story collections. Brokeback Mountain is a masterpiece and is one of the best stories I have read that completely runs the gamut of a relationship spanning decades. And it perfectly reflects the movie she provided so much material. Her writing is fluid and lovely and grand yet sparse and gets inside the characters in a such a great way it's intoxicating as a reader and makes you wring your own neck in frustration as a writer at how she did it. Just wonderful.

While "Brokeback Mountain" is the story in this collection that has gained the most notoriety, there are plenty of other pieces in the book that deserve the same recognition. "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water" and "Pair of Spurs" are among the other standouts.

Proulx has the enviable ability, found most conspicuously in Russian masters like Tolstoy and Turgenev, of being able to encapsulate entire lives in the confines of twenty or thirty pages. And she does it with a marvelously voracious love of language and detail, both elegant and earthy, reminiscent of Joyce and Rabelais.

Her dialogue is particularly acute and dead-on.

These stories are unblinking. They are not for the squeamish or prudish. They are about men and women living lives of real blood and guts, and they stick with one long after one has shut the covers of the book containing them.

In Annie Proulx's Wyoming, "[n]obody sends you out to do chores [or] treats you like a fool." That independence is illusory, however. There is always work that need to be done and basic needs that must be satisfied if one is to survive. Dreams are rarely realized. For the most part, people leave for more forgiving environments or they stay and fail on their home turf. All eleven short stories in this compilation are compelling, and all exhibit the technical skill demonstrated in Proulx's previous works. Vivid details of ranch work and rural life bring the stories to life. There is little sentimentality here. Even the mundane is converted into a metaphor for the inevitable failure of man confronting the problems presented by Wyoming's tough nature. The "new" West is also reflected in some of the stories, which juxtapose its values with those of Wyoming's traditional--Proulx would probably say "true"--character and attitude. Proulx's characters stoically persist in the face of difficulty or prejudice. Their perspective is explicitly stated in "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" (one of the few stories where a woman succeeds by a man's standards rather than being a sexual ornament or beast of burden): "The main thing in life was staying power. That was it: stand around long enough you'd get to sit down." The one story that does not work is the only love story in the collection, "Brokeback Mountain." The story, about an intense, long-term homosexual romance, is just not credible. The gay lovers even take three puppies on the pack trip that provides the occasion of their original meeting, "the runt inside Jack's coat, for he loved a little dog." Puppy-loving gay cowboys! C'mon, Ms. Proulx, you are better than that. My other criticism is that there are too few flights of fantasy and too little integration of Western folk tales into the stories. When those devices are employed, the effect is wonderful. I just wish there had been more. But that is more in the nature of a request than a criticism. "Close Range" will certainly help to cement Annie Proulx's reputation as an extraordinarily talented writer.

A well-meaning friend of mine, knowing I was from Wyoming, gave me this book while we were both working in L.A. The stories are well-written, but I suspect that those who most enthusiastically call it 'authentic' are those least qualified to do so. Their closest contact with Wyoming is probably flying over the state at 29,000 feet or possibly zooming along its southern border on I-80 with a few stops for gas. The book apparently describes how they THINK Wyoming ought to be, rather than how it IS.

Just as a Manhattanite can instantly spot a newcomer to New York, so can a Westerner instantly spot a newcomer to the West. Proulx writes about the West from an outsider's perspective -- something that's immediately obvious to anyone who was raised on a farm or ranch in the West.

Western writings which speak to me most are authored by those who have lived the life, rather than those who have merely observed the life. Other Westerners will recognize (and can undoubtedly add to) this list of western writers who have indisputably 'lived the life' : Will James, Spike Van Cleve, Charles M. Russell, Richmond P. Hobson, Ben K. Green, Elmer Kelton, Max Evans, and masters such as Wallace Stegner and Norman Maclean.

Annie Proulx has a boundless imagination and a talent for writing that leaves the reader reeling. Her characters are so immediately real that when a story ends, you are invariably left wondering, "Well, what next for this guy?"

The names are terrific. Proulx has a soft spot for the wacko character name--Diamond Felts, Ennis del Marr, Roany Hamp, Pake Bitts--but because the stories are so vividly rendered, the names stand up to the tales in which they appear.

Western stories all, this collection stands out with the now-famous "Brokeback Mountain"--a shortish story that covers 20 years and which reverberates in your mind for days after you read it. Another terrific one is "The Mud Below," about a teenager who discovers how good he is at rodeo-riding and how it comes to define and consume his life.

The dialogue is short and abrupt, the plot turns are sometimes brutal, all of which suits the atmospheric yet realistic west Annie Proulx evokes in this terrific book. HIGHLY recommended.

Annie Proulx's voice lands somewhere between the savagely humorous stories of Flannery O'Connor and the sparse and romantic beauty of Raymond Carver -- which, I suppose, is geographically appropriate.
I am a resident of Wyoming. I am not from here and I do not plan to stay here. I have little love for the barren landscape or the tough people of this land -- I would rather be in a cafe in San Francisco or a coffee shop in Greenwich Village. But I have seen enough of this place to validate the authenticity of Proulx's vision of this land, to a point anyway. Like anyplace, there are more people who watch too much TV and eat too many Oreos than there are who lead these lives of clenched teeth and fists.
For being about Wyoming, which they fully are, these stories cover a lot of ground. From the Blood Bay, a wonderfully humorous rewrite of a familiar ranch legend, to a story about a bullrider to anti-beef radical activists to a tractor who makes love to an overweight and lonely girl to the crowning story about two tough cowboys and their unusual love for each other, Annie Proulx's imagination almost makes up for the lack of imagination of everyone else in this state.
I will buy this book as a memoir of my year in this barren state. I will recommend this book as an excellent collection of stories from a remarkable writer about a tough land.

This collection of stories, by one of my favourite American authors, describes a world that most European readers, this one included, know nothing about. Yet, despite the sheer alien nature of this world for me, the stories touched and moved me with their beauty, imagery and finely-tuned writing. Proulx makes no concessions and the collection is all the stronger for it. "The Half-Skinned Steer" still haunts me now, months after I finished reading it. And the implacable fatalism of "Job History" is terrifying. I can't wait for the next book by this writer.

I bought this book for the Brokeback Mountain short story after seeing the movie and loving it. There are other really good stories in this collection that opened a door to a part of the country and its people that are foreign to me. I live in Alabama and am unfamiliar with the "west" having lived in a city all my life. I enjoyed this book and the beautiful verbal pictures it paints. There are excellent character studies and most stories are written in dialect. All in all, a bonus along with the Brokeback Mountain story which would have stood on its own.

I read this collection when it was first published, years ago. I had already read "Brokeback Mountain" in the New Yorker magazine in 1997, and had been totally swept away by that story. It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, to discover that this writer is to American short story writers what Alice Munro is to Canadian ones and William Trevor is to Irish ones.

"Pair of Spurs" is the mystical story of silver spurs with the power to change the lives of those in close contact with them, and you won't want to read "Blood Bay" if laughing out loud and raucously will disturb someone close by. Every story is a delight, and "Brokeback" is, as many already know, a heartbreaker.

Strongly recommended. Treat yourself.

As Wyoming has more open space than any imagination can conceive, Proulx's collection of short stories paint a volatile and weather-beaten world where human psyche runs wild in this vast state most people try to avoid. Her cadence rolls between local dialect and poetic language like the foothills outside of Ten Sleep. "Brokeback Mountain" finishes this collection with a wake up call to the west. Excellent storytelling . . . put it on your summer reading list.

I have read several novels by Annie Proulx, but never any short stories. Truthfully, I am not really a fan of the short story, but I saw the movie, Brokeback Mountain, and wanted to read the story upon which it was based. That story, as well as the others in the book, did not disappoint. Ms. Proulx is a very concise writer, but, at the same time, she paints a very vivid picture of the landscape and the characters. I live in a very urban area, and know nothing about the great plains of the midwest, but in Wyoming Stories, Ms. Proulx was able to show me what life was like there. In The Half-Skinned Steer, for example, I could feel the desperation sink into the main character as his cross-country trip to the funeral of his estranged brother slowly went very wrong. I highly recommend this book.

This is a wonderful compilation of short stories, even better, I believe, than "Heart Songs and Other Stories," which preceded her astonishing novel "The Shipping News." The stories in "Close Range" are all set in the rugged and brutal landscape of Wyoming, a landscape that informs and shapes her characters. They are life's losers, barely hanging on to sanity, love, hope and life itself. The stories reverberate with Proulx's jagged and passionate prose, a unique language that Proulx has invented to animate these stories. Fantastic work!

I finished Brokeback Mountain last night and wondered what moved me so. Was it just sympathy for the two men? Was it their hard life, there turning away from a love that would have been unthinkable in their day? Was it the soaring prose of Mrs Proulx? Of course, the answer is a bit of all these elements.

But is there something more . . . so much more? Something about innocence lost, wasted youth, the tender regrets of middle age, and the inevitable battering by life, leaving us hollow. . . and a bit sentimental for the fading memory of youth . . . when all was possible. This is the transcendent message of Brokeback Mountain.

Unlike many of my fellow Wyomingites, I found much to be admired in this collection of short stories and riffs (some stories are too short to be called anything BUT riffs).
Ms. Proulx captured the soul-jarring openness of the Great High Lonesome in such a way that makes THIS transplanted Wyomingite long for the prairies and rocks of her native home. It was wonderful to read those vivid and wonderful descriptions. In the scenery, I was brought home.
She is equally adept at sketching the surfaces of the people in her tales. I know many of the characters in her books well from my life on a Wyoming ranch.
However, she skated over the surface of these lives, never understanding the wonderful mix of hardheaded pragmatism, loving sentimentality, bitter practicality and blinding optimism that makes up the Wyoming character. She views these people with great cynicism and no understanding. And, to be fair to Ms. Proulx, Wyomingites are people that aren't easy to understand, much like the state itself. They show their harsh side to the world, but protect an inner beauty from casual outsiders. Ms. Proulx didn't bother to try to penetrate that harsh exterior, and given her lack of interest in staying in the state (even her bio notes admit she "lives in Wyoming" but spends most of her time away from the state), I doubt she ever will. And that's a shame.
I hope she'll take another crack at writing about Wyoming... perhaps in a novel, which is more her forte.

Annie's book is a great portrait of the underside of Western life-- one that I'd guess the majority of her readers never have to see nor deal with-- whether they live in Wyoming or not. I'd suppose the majority of Wyoming-ites wouldn't be too happy with stories of sodomizing cowboys, but from my twelve years in Idaho, I'd have to say that this is the closest-to-reality written description of the real lives of folks that do the work in the West. Annie doesn't discuss the very literal high-flying jet-set life that those who own the 60,000 acre ranches live-- she talks about the folks who are employed in this landlord-serf culture. And it ain't pretty. Highly recommended for all those in love with iconographic cowboy imagery. Maybe you'll actually feel something real instead of rope-em-up dreams.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Shipping News and known for vigorous mercurial prose, Annie Proulx takes readers on a journey of speed and destiny in Close Range. Her ability to uncover and dissipate the dead waters of American culture, providing a rich love of character and story in the process, is replete with momentum and artistry. Her stories burn like bonfires in the darkness of a vast literary plain.

--but the rest of the collection is powerful, too. If you haven't read Proulx, pick this one up. It's rough, raw, brutally honest storytelling.

But honestly, I can't explain what it is about Brokeback Mountain that makes me pull the book off the shelf at least twice a year since it came out five years ago. It's got to be one of the most intensely moving stories I've ever read in my life.

Those men, their lives. The scattered, fragile moments where they do connect, like that scene on the front porch when they haven't seen each other in four years or that moment where he finds the flannel shirts. Kick me in the gut while you grab my heart and rip it to shreds. You'll love it, I promise.

I'm sure that some people unfamiliar with Proulx's work or this story will permit the film adaptation to become another banal symbol of those crazy gays taking over EVERYTHING--and deny themselves the pleasure of reading good, solid American fiction.

Regardless, do yourself a huge favor: read this story before seeing the film (fingers crossed).

Annie Proulx manages to weave exquisite beauty into these stories which feature the roughest of cowboys and the harshest of landscapes. I was turned on to Proulx through the story "Brokeback Mountain", which appeared in an anthology of the best contemporary short stories, and I rushed out to buy this collection. The rest of the stories are equally beautiful. Proulx is a fine writer, creating unbelievably vivid stories with the lightest of hands. She is truly a master of language. Not one word is wasted. I generally would never pick up a book of cowboy stories, but Proulx has won me over. Her writing is superb, like poetry in motion. I too, am surprised at the Wyoming native who feels that Proulx has not represented Wyoming correctly. These are stories about individual people, and they are fiction. They do not represent all people from Wyoming. Rather, they capture the beauty of Wyoming, while weaving breathtaking, sometimes heartbreaking, but always unique tales. Proulx is a superior writer, and I highly recommend this collection of short stories.

Glimpses of heaven and hell and what lies in between. Proulx's short stories touch all the notes of the human condition, exhaultant and beautiful, weak or ugly. Powerful imagery. Some of the endings seem a little abrupt and a few seem hindered by her wordsmithing rather than freed by it, but when she strikes the perfect balance between poetry and story, like "Brokeback Mountain", she really nails it.

Rawlins, Wyoming, once famous for "Rawlins Red," the pigment first used to paint the Brooklyn Bridge, is my hometown. The mines for that pigment were a favorite, very dangerous place to play when I was a kid.
Annie Proulx, who lives in Wyoming, has truly captured the spirit and feel of my home state. The experiences of an elderly man, drawn to his old home in Wyoming and driving through a blizzard, brought back many memories. I've had hard times in similar circumstances, lost in a blizzard. The people she describes brought to mind old friends and acquaintances. The last story, about two sheepherders who find themselves in love with each other, is a wonderful glimpse of a reality that many Wyomingites deny although it is very much there.
I love Borges, but I love Proulx, too. If you want a very smart read that brings to life a part of this country that too many people know too little about, then read this book. It is excellent. Go get your copy now.

While Annie Proulx can render a fine image and has firsthand knowledge of her landscape and her characters, nonetheless all the recent accolades and critical acclaim have hyped her beyond her talents, creating expectations that her book cannot deliver upon. Her prose style is neither that of a virtuoso nor that of a hack--at first read she has an interesting "stew" method wherein she creates a rambling sentence from various fragments of speech, but before too many pages pass this seems less creative than lazy: her cacophony of details begins to read like reproductions from a writer's journal or a cookbook, and one can imagine her laving huge portions of her notes into stories that by necessity cannot be conventional in form as they are largely formless. There are certainly some fine moments in this collection, but once the dust has cleared, Proulx is entirely unessential, both in this work and in Postcards (I cannot speak for any other of her books). These stories at times sound the same dull bell-notes over and over: tough lives, tough people, tough landscape. Many call her "poetic" but among contemporary writers both Ondaatje and McCarthy are far more successful in melding the mechanics of prose with the awe of poetry. Were Proulx's name not shouted from the mountaintops so much lately perhaps one could be a far more forgiving reader, but for a book so greatly hyped, I was greatly disappointed.

There's no question that AP has a masterful style. As another reviewer noted, it can be insidious, because you can be drawn by her great talent at creating a mood. Ultimately though, her work here disappoints because it is so uniformly bleak, without any contrast. The people she chooses to describe are losers, hard on themselves and on each others. I listened to this on audio books and I was "entertained" while driving some long distances. However, after story after story left me with no sense of real climax or conclusion, and certainly without any hope or warmth, I gave up on them.

What finally did me in was the story of the young fellow who had been terribly deformed in an accident, and then was castrated by his neighbors. Or was it the image of a half-skinned cow roaming the range with his tongue cut out that made me take the CD out of the player?

Ultimately the writer selects from the environment what she wants to see. These stories may show a part of Wyoming life, but it certainly doesn't represent all of it. I wish she would turn her eye to a brighter side of life; her talent is wasted here.

I purchased this book mainly to read the story of "Brokeback Mountain". I was surprised to find 10 other remarkable stories that came along with it. Each story is about different people in all stages of life in various situations. The only commonality between them all is that each one lives in Wyoming. When I started the first story I think I had a shock at the strong writing style of Proulx, which was quick and to the point. She does not use a lot of words and long drawn out descriptions, but still manages to create powerfully vivid pictures propelling the reader right into the story. As I continued on, I realized that each story had its own style. Some went indepth into one character while other jumped around showing all sides and perspectives. My personal favorite was "Job History" with its abrupt paragraphs skipping from person to person, topic to topic. I don't know how true a picture these stories present of the cowboy's rural lifestyle, but they seem very real to me and I feel they have given me a true perspective into to a way of life I have never quite understood.

I have read every book written by Annie Proulx and almost every review available; few of them make much of the humor in all of her books, and Close Range most especially. Read this book for all the reasons mentioned in other reviews-characterization, poetry, description of place, humanity--but read it also for her ability to make you laugh out loud.

These short stories are are tough as the Wyoming land they're set into. Tales of rough lives at the edge of solitude and despair, unforgiving charachters in an unforgiving land, where even rusty abandoned tractors have a soul, and sex comes with no frills attached. Brokeback Mountain is by no means the only noteworty story in the set, and surely one of the mildest in many ways.

Buyer beware: living in this Wyoming is not for the faint of heart. Reading these lyrically written stories of despair and vast loneliness is not either.

I wanted to read Close Range mostly for Brokeback Mountain. The many loose-ends and unanswered questions from the movie were troubling. I was disappointed that the story was only 30 pages long and even more sparsely sketched than the movie. The other stories were gripping, but about halfway through I was wishing the book would soon be over. The stories were unrelentingly grim. I never kept a tally, but I believe in most of the stories one of the main characters dies and then is largely unmourned by the other inhabitants, who are too miserable already with their own bleak lives. In one disturbing story a young man is grotesquely deformed by an auto accident and is later castrated by neighbors and dies of a ghastly case of gangrene. The language of the stories is so contrived and affected that it seems like the entire state and all it's inhabitants were an invention of Ms. Proulx, with little resemblance to the actual state. Back to the subject of Brokeback Mountain. I wished that I had read the story before seeing the movie. Instead of two handsome movie-star studs, the characters from the story were pretty ordinary. One had a somewhat sunken chest and developed a growth on his eyelid and the other was heavy around the hips and had buck-teeth. I think the images from the story would have been much different from the movie and given it a very different, but truer, twist. On the whole, Brokeback Mountain is a wonderful and sad story about lost opportunities that makes the whole book worthwhile.

A work of fiction is simply that: fiction. Proulx is a gifted writer and an exceptional stylist and this book is a salient example of her talent. Why is it that this book has to stand for all Wyomongites? These are the people Proulx chose to write about whether you like it or not; that is the artist's right, she shouldn't have to explain her characterizations to everyone. Get over your inferiority complexes and read the stories for what they are; excellent representations of the craft of fiction, not universal truths or accurate portrayals of the people who live in your state. I respect the fact that she portrays people with problems in an unsympathetic light and doesn't pander to the pc cry babies who say a book is worthless if it doesn't conform to a group of people's own imagined identity. Are all Dubliners represented in Joyce, is the South encompassed by Faulkner? No, fiction is not sociology so get off your high-horses and appreciate the stories even if the characters aren't cowboys in white hats and damsels in distress.

Annie Proulx has a bewitching way of entertaining; perplexing and emotionally devastating you in Close Range.

A persistantly omniscient narrator, she pulls you through her tales as if you are dreaming. Unlike the barely comprehensible state of R.E.M., however, you have the opportunity to go back and carefully re-examine the words on the page. Proulx understands how emotions shift, how definitions slip away, how our sense of meaning can be maddeningly unreliable. Close Range reveals the American West as dying (sometimes literally) to be reborn, full of characters who don't reveal the answers to life's philosophical questions. Prepare to laugh, gasp, weep and carry these stories in your heart for a long time to come.

I have wanted to read this collection ever since I first picked up "The Shipping News" many years ago, but it was never available in the bookstores where I live. When the film, Brokeback Mountain, was released, the short story was reprinted singly, but I still didn't buy it because I wanted to read the entire collection. I haven't even seen the movie because I wanted to read the story first. After purchasing it here (and finishing it just a few minutes ago) I must say it was worth every penny and the years of waiting. While the other stories are great, Brokeback Mountain truly stands out, and in my opinion takes its place as one of the greatest love stories of this century. Haunting and beautiful, Annie Proulx shows us that while love may have many different faces, it only has one heart, one that everyone who has ever loved will share.

I was never too interested in short stories until I purchased these two books . I wish I had the way with words that Ms Proulx has . Her descriptions , her way of delving into a persons mind , to show an understanding of why people are the way they are, is wonderful . This collection includes Brokeback Mountain , the current film , up for an Academy Award . I saw the movie before I read the book . I loved the film and to my great surprise the film goes right along with the short story .

I recommend anything that Annie Proulx has written ,shes a wonderful story teller and these short stories are great at bedtime when you can read one in a short time and turn out the light , satisfied to have completed the tale in one sitting and ready for a relaxing nights sleep .

Try Annie Proulx , you won't be disappointed .

Annie Proulx is a master wordsmith. Her "Close Range" abounds with a unique talent for quick-sketched technicolor mind paintings. No other author comes close to her compelling style. Yet the yarns she spins in Close Range describe a Wyoming ranch life totally foreign to this `30s ranch-raised vaquero whose memories are breach-loaded with hard-working, straight-shooting, honorable men and women who wouldn't stoop to the four-letter vocabulary so generously woven throughout this book. Except, perhaps, the single truncated four-letter contraction of "manure" which cannot be ignored by ranch hands. The stories range from depressing to disgusting, yet altogether well told.

A beautifully written collection of stories that captures the isolation and living experience in Wyoming. A lot about horses and ranching.

The stories vary in quality -- some are excellent and others I couldn't get into. I skipped through a couple of them. The subject matter is bit depresing at times and not a book to read when you're feeling down. I especially liked Brokeback Mountain which sparked the wonderful movie of the same name.

Ms. Proulx is a literary writer of considerable skill and this book is a worthy read if not an outstanding one.

Proulx writes that the short story form is difficult for her - her hard work paid off in spades!!! What a wonderful book - a wondrous, poetic, heartfelt collection of real people. I agree with Billman's earlier review - I am buying copies for my friends. I have to share this remarkable experience of reading an author at her absolute best. One story can make you feel you have read a novel about these characters. I can only compare her with Cormac McCarthy, whose All the Pretty Horses I consider one of the greatest books of the 20th century. They both write with heart, and soul about the real West.

After carefully anylising Proulx character development and precise diction it seems to me that the whether the characters depicted by Proulx capture the spirit of Wyoming is irrelevant. Each of these characters should be taken both in correlation with the setting and also they should be allowed to stand on their own. These characters should serve to titilate by thier absurd responses to life, not to portray an active representation of the Wyoming landscape. Proulx makes a very conscious effort to seperate Wyoming from her characters. If fact you could say that Wyoming could be seen as an individual character. Each character interacts with eachother but they are not to be taken as the same thing.

Annie Proulx, with her "CLOSE RANGE", proves herself a master at the art of writing short stories. The tales told here are not "novel creations", rather real people who still live in the Old West as their forebearers before them. Trapped by circumstance, family, whatever, Annie's residents of Wyoming give us a hard look at a hard life. Any one of these stories would make a bestseller, standing alone and tens of thousands of extra words. Annie's true gift is to convey a myriad of emotions with a brevity of words, never sacrficing the story's true power.

I loved these stories. She is an incredible author. I really cannot think of another author that puts me right into the place. The strange names of the characters are somehow helpful in portraying their personalities. I saw the movie Brokeback before reading the story and the movie was so powerful I don't feel I can judge the story except that they are almost identical. I hope she lives to 150 and writes 10 books a year!!!