Close Range: Wyoming Stories Hardcover - 1999

From the jacket flap

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. . . .

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.

Media reviews

Citations

• Booklist, 03/15/1999, Page 1261
• Entertainment Weekly, 11/05/1999, Page 73
• Kirkus Reviews, 03/01/1999, Page 325
• Library Journal, 01/01/2000, Page 0
• Library Journal Prepub Alert, 01/01/1999, Page 68
• LJ Best Books of Year, 01/01/2000, Page 50
• New York Times, 12/05/1999, Page 8
• New Yorker (The), 12/20/1999, Page 98
• Publishers Weekly, 03/29/1999, Page 91
• Publishers Weekly Best Books, 01/01/1999, Page 47