Close Range: Wyoming Stories - Softcover

Proulx, E. Annie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857029429 ISBN 13: 9781857029420

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 1999

Synopsis

A new short-story collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes. Includes the acclaimed stories, Brokeback Mountain (winner of a National Magazine Award) and The Mud Below.

Annie Proulx’s previous short story collection Heart Songs was universally acclaimed: ‘A shining collection...a polished, unflinching work.’ (The Times).

The new collection includes Brokeback Mountain, the highly-acclaimed and award-winning tale set in the beautiful, wild landscape of Wyoming where cowboys live as they have done for generations. Also included is the story The Mud Below that reveals the world of the rodeo, buckle bunnies and the quiet ambition of the boy who gives up everything to ride bulls.

Remarkable and memorable, these new short stories will confirm Annie Proulx’s status as one of the great story-tellers of our times.

About this title

Review

Annie Proulx published her first novel, Postcards in 1991; her second, The Shipping News, won the Pulitzer prize in 1993 and in 1997 her third novel, Accordion Crimes, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Close Range: Wyoming Stories is her second collection of short stories, including the acclaimed novella, "Brokeback Moutain". Described by one critic as a "profanely poetic and beautiful elegy on doomed manhood," this story of love and sex--"a shared and sexless hunger"--between two cowboys exemplifies the world of Close Range. "If you can't fix it you've got to stand it": that could be the motto of any one of these eleven tales of lives lived out in the relentless, sometimes sickening, brutality of ranch and range. From "The Half-Skinned Steer" (take the title literally) to "55 Miles to the Gas Pump" and "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water", bodies (often male) are broken and mangled; a nervous woman throws her baby daughter away and a prodigal son rots with gangrene; women are confused with bulls, lovemaking with riding a rodeo. Grotesque, damaged: lost bodies, and dreams, are the themes of this relentless and skilfully crafted book. Far from revelling in the violence, and loss, they uncover, these stories think it through--take the reader towards the poetry and compassion which is the hallmark of Proulx's writing. --Vicky Lebeau

Review

‘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

‘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

Edition details

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1857029429
• ISBN 13: 9781857029420
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320