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Close Range: Wyoming Stories

by Annie Proulx

Close Range: Wyoming Stories Cover

ISBN13: 9780684852225
ISBN10: 0684852225
Condition: Standard
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

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 these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace.

These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent — by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

Review:

Anna MundowNew York Daily NewsClose Range is not one long dirge simply played in eleven different keys. Each story presents a subtle change of mood and each character inhabits a particular world, a world that Proulx constructs with graceful, devastating sentences.

Review:

The New York Times

Powerful...Read [the stories] for their absolute authenticity and their language, a wry poetry of loneliness and pain.

Review:

Michael UpchurchThe Seattle Times Book ReviewHer characters — stoical, hardheaded, yet willing to be ravaged by the closest available passion whenever the chance presents itself — crackle and cavort on the page. Served up a full array of life's wayward ecstasies and gut-twisting losses, they resign themselves, in true Proulx fashion, to the damage that loss and ecstasy do....Amen to that, and amen to this book.

Review:

Michael KnightThe Wall Street JournalMs. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms.

Review:

Outside magazine

A major achievement in American fiction — a gorgeous, deeply affecting adventure in stylistic plenitude, prose clarity, and hearts laid bare.

Review:

Michael Knight

The Wall Street Journal

Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms.

About the Author

Annie Proulx has held NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships and residences at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Her first short story collection, Heart Songs and Other Stories, appeared in 1988, followed in 1992 by Postcards, which won the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The 1993 novel The Shipping News won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Accordion Crimes, Proulx's most recent novel, was published in June 1996.

She began working on the stories collected in Close Range in 1997. "The Half-Skinned Steer" was selected by Garrison Keillor for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 1998 and by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century. "Brokeback Mountain" won a 1998 O. Henry Short Story Award and a National Magazine Award through its publication in The New Yorker.

Annie Proulx lives in Wyoming, but spends much of the year traveling North America.

Table of Contents

Contents

The Half-Skinned Steer

The Mud Below

Job History

The Blood Bay

People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water

The Bunchgrass Edge of the World

Pair a Spurs

A Lonely Coast

The Governors of Wyoming

55 Miles to the Gas Pump

Brokeback Mountain

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
dosgatosazules, September 1, 2006 (view all comments by dosgatosazules)
Most people will buy this book for "Brokeback Mountain", its final story. For that story alone, this book is worth its price; the writing is spare and epic and beautiful. Proulx has achieved something rare among the writers I have encountered (other than maybe Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy): a distinctive cadence. Her tone, the imagery, and the actual rythym of the words themselves are unique to her and match perfectly the setting and characters.

The book has several standouts; in addition to "Brokeback Mountain", "Job History" is another gem about the life of a Wyoming farmer and his wife, told in journalistic snippets of their catastrophes. My only quarrel might be that I found no story to equal Brokeback Mountain (I realize "The Half-Skinned Steer" has also been showered with praise, but I couldn't get into it after several tries) but they're all unique and possessed of Proulx's singular voice.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780684852225
Subtitle:
Wyoming Stories
Author:
Proulx, Annie
Author:
Prouix, Annie
Author:
Proulx, E. Annie
Publisher:
Scribner Book Company
Location:
New York, NY :
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Short Stories (single author)
Subject:
Frontier and pioneer life
Subject:
Ranch life
Subject:
Wyoming
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
General Fiction
Copyright:
Edition Description:
B102
Publication Date:
February 10, 2000
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
288
Dimensions:
7.92x5.42x.66 in. .53 lbs.
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