Close Range: Wyoming Stories
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.
‘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