Wyoming Stories

A breathtaking collection of unabridged stories from the Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes. Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Close Range features 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 Monthly, Harper's and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

Annie Proulx follows the success of Close Range with another remarkable collection of stories. Bad Dirt is filled with the vivid characters for which Proulx has become known. In "The Contest," the male population of Elk Tooth, Wyoming, vows to put aside their razors for two seasons, ante up ten dollars each, and wait to see who has the longest beard on July 4. Deb Sipple, the moving protagonist of "That Trickle-Down Effect," finds that his opportunism-and his smoking habit-lead to a massive destruction. In every story in this book, Proulx displays her wit and her knowledge of the West, of history, and most of all of characters who must use sheer will and courage to make it in tough territory.

Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain," National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral collection of new stories. In Fine Just the Way It Is, she has expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate. Proulx's characters try to climb out of poverty and desperation but get cut down as if the land itself wanted their blood. Deeply sympathetic to the men and women fighting to survive in this harsh place, Proulx turns their lives into fiction with the power of myth -- and leaves the listener in awe. The winner of two O. Henry Prizes, Annie Proulx has been anthologized in every major collection of great American stories. Her bold, inimitable language, her exhilarating eye for detail and her dark sense of humor make this a profoundly compelling collection.

Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, "Brokeback Mountain" is her masterpiece. Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent intolerance.