About this title: Eleven stories, all set in the harsh Wyoming landscape, about characters whose desperate lives illuminate a range of human experience that is full of farce, tragedy, and grit. The volume is illustrated with watercolors.
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Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges and may have creases. read more
Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges. read more
"Annie Proulx is an incredible writer. This is the first book of hers I've read, but I'll definitely be looking for more.
I picked this one up because of its subtitle. I've driven through Wyoming several times, always as part of a cross-country road trip, and though I've never stayed for long - not even for the night, that I recall - Wyoming epitomizes for me that feeling that I so miss when I'm not road tripping: The sense of being all alone in a vast emptiness of road and sky and natural wonder. I didn't get to do much car travel this summer, and I'd been depressed about it. This book was a wonderful substitute.
What I especially love about Proulx's writing is her incomparable ability to evoke a sense of place. Reading passages like this, I was transported to the rocky ranchland of Wyoming:
You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country - indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky - provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.
Proulx's characters are also uncommonly well-drawn. They feel like people I've known - maybe not liked, maybe not admired - but real people, with all of their complex motivations and mixed feelings.
The stories themselves are pretty gloomy: desperate people trying to eke out a living, the unimaginable cruelty humans can inflict on one another, the inevitability of death. Still, there were enough sparks of humor and hope to keep the stories from being too tragic. Some of them are tall tales, others employ a hefty dose of that "magical realism" stuff I don't really get, and others are straightforward. The best of them is the most famous, "Brokeback Mountain", which is both better and more heartbreaking than the film. I also particularly enjoyed "The Half-Skinned Steer", although reading it late at night was an utterly petrifying experience, and "People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water", which is one of the most wretchedly true stories I've ever read.
Proulx can get opaquely literary at times, which as a style has its drawbacks, although I thought it fit well with these stories. Yes, I had to reread some passages to grasp their full meaning or symbolism, but sometimes it's nice to be able to sink my teeth into literature that way. And these are stories that are definitely worth rereading. I plan to again and again, whenever I'm stuck at home and longing for that empty highway."
"Sometimes there are so many characters you stop paying attention to who's saying what. Sometimes there are so many storylines, one emerging from another, you forget who is being described. I could criticize Proulx for this, but the irritation is my own fault. I want to read a short story collection as fast as I read a novel, but you can't. You need to read about one a day, and slowly with Proulx, to really absorb how completely full, engaging, unique and realized each story is. The lives of the characters are also so well-researched and hyper-detailed you need to work to say involved, until some revelation or incident--or exquisite sentence--sucks your attention into the book completely. Unfortunately, the short story volume as a medium requires you to constantly restart, reacquaint and re-engage--if you insist on reading the book too fast. All the stories have real momentum, but the climaxes always hit you off-guard. "Brokeback Mountain" would have to be at the end or the rest of the stories would seem heartless. That story is the truest account of love I have ever read. I read it in college before the movie came out and it affected me the same way then. All the stories of perfect really. But "Brokeback Mountain" is peerless. You don't see it coming after so many rough life accounts. And it is the roughest. The loss is so intense because the love and the joy were just as massive."
"Just reread this, after I kept looking up, seeing it on the shelf, and thinking, "Man, I need to reread that."
There isn't a wasted word in this book. The stories are lean, visceral, and operatic. Her characters and plots surprise in the way that Flannery O'Connor's do, by spontaneous manifestations of grace and evil.
The collection begins and ends with two masterpieces: "The Half-Skinned Steer"--a tale of fate that uses an Icelandic legend--and "Brokeback Mountain," a love story that rings with doom reminiscent of Greek tragedy.
Wyoming is the central, reoccurring character: a hard, merciless, and miraculous landscape that serves (like Cormac McCarthy's border region) as a fitting backdrop for so many scenes of raw humanity.
Annie Proulx makes many contemporary writers look like they're not trying. This is how she opens this collection: "In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.""
"A collection of mostly excellent, though depressing, short stories. I enjoyed the strangeness of Accordian Crimes more than the dour and repressed Close Range, but there is no getting around the power Proulx can exercise over the imagination.
Having grown up in South Dakota, the Wyoming environment that Proulx cultivates is not totally unknown to me, and moreover, feels pretty true to some of the sort of people I used to know back home. Like the plants on the landscape that Proulx loves to write about, the people of these stories have to be tough and persistent to survive. They have to be able to go a long time without water. Yet she has a way of shedding light on their inner lives too, and their secret desperation.
The first story in the collection, "the Half-Skinned Steer" was my favorite, but there are several more that meet a high standard, and only a couple that feel below average. Of course, as everyone knows, Brokeback Mountain is also included in this collection, and is as good a short story as it is a film. The film is remarkably true to the story, though now I see the main characters as the actors in the movie.
Proulx is an exceedingly gifted writer and I look forward to reading more of her work in the future. Turns out there is more going on in Wyoming that meets the eye."
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