Close Range: Wyoming Stories
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Shipping News’ comes a collection of short stories inspired by the harsh and unforgiving landscape of Wyoming.
Throughout the collection, Annie Proulx invests these stories with an intelligence and black humour that transforms them into something new and surprising. In one story, a slight young man defies his mother’s insults to become a rodeo star, while in another, an octogenarian finds himself drawn back to the ranch that he quit decades before – against his better judgement. Elsewhere, Proulx demonstrates her taste for the macabre in a grisly tale of bad weather, gambling and amputation set a hundred years ago.
Inventive, compassionate and wildly funny, these marvellous stories explore the unbreakable bond between a people and their land.
‘Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms’, The Wall Street Journal -
”'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
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