Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 - Hardcover

Proulx, Annie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743257995 ISBN 13: 9780743257992

Publisher: Scribner, 2004

Synopsis

A new anthology of short fiction by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author features an array of stories, all set in Wyoming, that feature colorful, eccentric, and moving characters who have a profound effect on the people around them, in such tales as "The Trickle Down Effect," "The Contest", and "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?" 125,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Praise for Close Range:

‘A stunning collection of eleven tales about the hard lives of the ranchers, cowpokes and country wives who struggle to survive in an unforgiving environment. Written in a wonderfully flexible style that can be both spare and extravagant, her book has been hailed by American critics as a masterpiece.’ Daily Telegraph

‘Like a mystic seeing the transfigured universe, she recreates the beauty of ordinary things.’ Independent on Sunday

‘The detail is meticulous, the prose poetic and Proulx's fiction teems with life. Above all, her stories engage the heart. Magical.’ Tatler

‘Proulx's style, compressed, elastic, hard-hitting, is inimitable: close to poetry but never self-indulgent. This is writing to be savoured.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘These are tales we can almost feel in our bones.’ Sunday Times

‘As lean, confident and exact as a stylist, and as good a storyteller, as you could hope for. Buy this book.’ Observer

‘Individually, these 11 tales have a tautness and an urgency that are never less than exhilarating. Collectively, they encapsulate an entire, unremittingly bleak world. To find the pulse of humanity in such desperate lives betokens a writer of genius.’ Saturday Telegraph

From the Back Cover:

Annie Proulx's Wyoming - already familiar to readers of the best-selling collection Close Range - is at once ordinary and extraordinary, an isolated expanse of wasters and dreamers, whose inhabitants say there's no place like home but long for buffets and icebergs, imported olives and French cornichons. It is a state in which men grow beards competitively, in which a magic wish-granting kettle is as likely to bring microwave ovens as murder, in which Bible classes wonder 'What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?'

Bad Dirt is filled with the vivid and wilful characters for which Annie Proulx has become known: Cheri Wham, who married the sociopathic school bully and is raising a herd of beer-swilling children; Dr Playfire, who casts smug aspersions on his patients' paternity; Gilbert Wolfscale, who farms turkeys and adorns them with cranberry Thanksgiving necklaces to outdo the plastic-wrapped supermarket birds and their 'breasts like Las Vegas strippers'.

Annie Proulx has a profound sympathy for her unassumingly innocent characters, whose deepest secrets and desires are revealed with masterful skill. With cleverly wrought complications and magical twists, her latest collection is a work of wonderful imagination and unrivalled storytelling.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743257995
• ISBN 13: 9780743257992
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 219