Close Range: Wyoming Stories - Brossura

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

The Boston Globe Few writers feel equally at home in the novel and the short story...[these stories] are tough as flint and on occasion breathtaking; together they stand with Proulx's best work.

People As she rips away our romantic notions of the West, Proulx asks how capable any of us are of outrunning our origins. Her fatalistic answer, in these stories, adds up to some breathtaking reading.

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

Richard Eder The New York Times Book Review Geography, splendid and terrible, is a tutelary deity to the characters in Close Range. Their lives are futile uphill struggles conducted as a downhill, out-of-control tearaway. Proulx writes of them in a prose that is violent and impacted and mastered just at the point where, having gone all the way to the edge, it is about to go over.

Michael Knight The Wall Street Journal Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms.

Carolyn See The Washington Post Book World It's the prose, as much as the inventiveness of the stories here, that shines and shines. Every single sentence surprises and delights and just bowls you over.

Michael Upchurch The Seattle Times Book Review Her 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.

Jill Vejnoska Atlanta Journal-Constitution Annie Proulx isn't easy. Little she writes about smacks of the familiar. Where so many successful authors strive to create worlds that are instantly, even comfortably, recognizable to readers, Proulx goes where few others would. It isn't easy, but Close Range is definitely worth it.

Anna Mundow New York Daily News Close 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.

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.