Close Range: Wyoming Stories

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 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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 05/10/1999
ISBN: 9780684852218
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.53h x 6.39w x 1.17d
Award: New Yorker Book - Winner

Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 01/01/1999 pg. 68
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/1999 pg. 325
Publishers Weekly 03/29/1999 pg. 91
Booklist 03/15/1999 pg. 1261
Library Journal 05/01/1999 pg. 115
New York Times 05/23/1999 pg. 8
New York Times 06/06/1999 pg. 34
Entertainment Weekly 11/05/1999 pg. 73
New Yorker (The) 12/20/1999 pg. 98
LJ Best Books of Year 01/01/2000 pg. 50
New York Times 12/05/1999 pg. 8
Publishers Weekly Best Books 01/01/1999 pg. 47
Library Journal 01/01/1999
Library Journal 01/01/2000