Close Range: Wyoming Stories

Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Barkskins, showcases her "gritty and gleaming" (The New York Times Book Review) writing in Close Range, one of the most celebrated story collections of all time--includes "Brokeback Mountain."

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 the iconic story "Brokeback Mountain," the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world's 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, Harper's, and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998, The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 02/10/2000
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.53lbs
Size: 7.92h x 5.42w x 0.66d
ISBN: 9780684852225


Award: L.A. Times Book Prize - Nominee
Award: Ambassador Book Awards - Winner
Award: WILLA Literary Award - Winner


Review Citation(s):
Entertainment Weekly 02/04/2000 pg. 65
New York Times 02/13/2000 pg. 32
Outside 10/01/2008 pg. 38
New York Review of Books 10/23/2008 pg. 41
Entertainment Weekly 09/04/2015 pg. 45

About the Author
Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story "Brokeback Mountain," which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent novel is Barkskins. She lives in Seattle.