One of the most heartbreakingly fierce collections of short stories I've ever read. Incredible.

Hienoja novelleja, karuja ihmisiä karuissa ympäristöissä. Rodeotähtiä, karjatilallisia ja – niin, niitä homoseksuaaliset taipumuksensa tukahduttavia lammaspaimenia.

Annie Proulx on oivallinen kirjailija, hyvä että nappasin kirjastosta varaukseen kerralla kaikki kolme Wyoming-kokoelmaa.

Great collection of stories. "Brokeback Mountain" is probably the most famous one, for obvious reasons, but all the others are equally good. I'm amazed at Annie Proulx's ability to convey the male perspective, especially in such particular (and masculine) circumstances as rodeo or ranching. Her prose is quite harsh and unvarnished, and full of dry humour, just like Wyoming itself and its people, but at the same time it's beautiful in its bluntness, even poetic. I found these stories irresistible and fascinating.

I love E. Annie Proulx. I honestly think that Myers guy must just have some problems he's got to sort out. I didn't read his book, but the examples he gave in that article of how awful her prose is only reminded me how much I enjoy her stuff, and made me want to go back and read some Proulx again. And I really don't think I'm especially pretentious, or cowed by snooty literary reviewers, whom I barely read. In fact I barely read at all these days, I have such a short attention span, and to me this is the accessible literature for the distractable masses that Myers is moaning gets no respect. Proulx tells wonderful stories, and she tells them wonderfully. That's it, buddy! Yeah, her writing's wordy and weird, and maybe doesn't make much logical sense when analyzed adjective-by-adjective by a cranky old pedant who suggests that female authors are particularly terrible and sloppy and not up to par with the wonderful masculine greats of yesteryear..... hey, come to think of it, screw you, B. R. Myers! E. A. Proulx's a woman, and a fabulous writer! Go team!

THHPT!!!!

I loved every story I didn’t like

The stark beauty of wide open spaces and the love of outdoor life bonded many of the characters to the land in Annie Proulx's first book of her Wyoming trilogy. But other characters left the hardships, isolation, and loneliness of the rural Wyoming towns, never to return. Some worked tough, physical, low-paying jobs in the harsh Wyoming environment and used alcohol to cope. Wealthy people bought failing ranches to use as dude ranches for weekend getaways.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories is composed of eleven short stories with the prize winners at the beginning and the end of the book. "The Half-Skinned Steer" is based on an Icelandic folk tale with a twist at the end. "Brokeback Mountain" is the tragic love story of two gay cowboys and homophobia, and has been adapted into a film by Ang Lee. "The Mud Below" tells about a bull rider who is living for the adrenalin rush, and who is compensating for problems with his parents. "The Blood Bay" is a Western tale with a comic twist.

Annie Proulx lived in Wyoming for several years before writing Close Range: Wyoming Stories, and uses many regional expressions in her prose. The Wyoming environment is a character in many of the stories. Although many characters are portrayed with broken bodies and broken spirits after years on the range or in the rodeo, there is a lot of dark humor too. The six watercolor illustrations of Western scenes by William Matthews in the hardcover book were an added plus.

A friend loaned me this yesterday so I dug right in last night. I am NOT a big Proulx fan. I've read some stories(mostly in the New Yorker) plus "The Shipping News." Prose-wise AP is strong medicine and I do appreciate her abilities and intellect. My gripes have had more to do with content than style. Much of her stuff to me seems like a lot of prose stylin' in service of murky purposes. Then there's the rank cruelty, present in the very first story ...

1 - The Half-Skinned Steer - A confusing-gruesome tale of Western whimsy that winds up in a Wyoming snow storm with yet another of AP's clueless oddballs. I've BEEN in Wyoming in the winter on a cold snowy night and find it hard to believe that anyone would think it was an OK idea to go off-(main)road in an old Cadillac looking for a ranch gate in the middle of NOWHERE in an f-ing blizzard when a cozy motel room in a local motel was nearby. Then there's the fate of the title "character," which to me seemed obvious from the git-go. When the "surprise" was sprung it was no surprise to me. That's the ambiguous cruelty factor ... The point of it all? People are stupid, careless, violent assholes? Seems to be a theme of hers.

- Where is Woolfoot, Massachusetts???

- "Killed by a waspy emu" ?????

- "Laid him open from belly to breakfast ..." - very funny - not. The Proulx theater of cruelty ...

2 - The Mud Below - The title is possibly reference to a sort-of documentary film from the 60's(?) titled "The Sky Above, the Mud Below" which I never did see. This is a more "ordinary" tale of the life of a rodeo dude. Not bad.

- High school sports like wrestling and football aren't called "courses", Annie.

- Ms. Proulx is up to her usual tricks with all the funky-cutesy names. Nuthin' but a gimmick as far as I'm concerned.

- George Saunders might be a distant literary cousin to Annie Proulx.

3 - Job History - This one pretty sums up the "theme" of these stories, which tell of the hard-scrabble lives of Wyoming's flyover white nobodies. Life is ever a struggle for these low-dollar, dreamy, under-educated survivors. Life IS tough in Wyoming, that's why almost nobody lives there year-round.

- Despite living not that far away in Boulder/Denver for nearly 17 years, I only ever made one road trip into Wyoming ... in December ... up to Jackson Hole. The drive up was kind of nasty, then it got balmy and the drive back was nice enough. Saw a bighorn sheep. At the end of the summer of 1962 my family drove from Lafayette, California(Bay Area) all the way to Woods Hole, Massachusetts(where you get the ferry to Martha's Vineyard). We crossed southern Wyoming on U. S. Route 30, which has since been replaced by I-80, though bits and pieces of it(Rt. 30) are still out there. Southern/western Wyoming had the bleakest landscape I'd ever seen. I've some other sparse places since then but I was definitely impressed. That was looking to the south towards Colorado ...

4 - The Blood Bay - Short and silly.

5 - People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water - read so long ago I can't remember it. Been in and out of the hospital lately. It's very distracting!

6 - The Bunchgrass Edge of the World. Ditto ...

7 - Pair a Spurs. Ditto ...

8 - A Lonely Coast. Read recently and remembered as uber-Proulx. Over-written and possibly pointless, but still fun to read.

Finished with a rush the past few days and finding that I need to raise the rating to 4* on the strength of the last stories: "The Governors of Wyoming"(#9) and "Brokeback Mountain."(#11) These are both more mainstream in style and content and thus more worthy - IMHO. I liked "B. Mtn" better than the movie, because the movie has no verbal poetry and sweep. It misses the considerable juice provided by the Proulx prose. To me the movie was just OK and not as moving at the end as the story itself. Also, the two protagonists seemed very similar in the story, while Jake Gyllenhal(sp?) and Heath Ledger seemed quite different in the movie. NOT a big deal ... Jake's fate was made more explicit in the movie than the book. The writers had to do it that way, I suppose, whereas in the book we are let in on Ennis' private(unspoken) conclusions.

10 - 55 Miles to the Gas Pump - two pages of Uber-Proulx weirdness. Suggestive of "Child of God by C. McCarthy.

- 3.75* rounds up to 4*.

I’m more inclined to recommend individual stories out of E. Annie Proulx’s Close Range as opposed to the whole book. Every story is set in Wyoming (as is noted by the book’s subtitle). This makes for an interesting dynamic as the reader already has an idea of what Wyoming is like and a setting description given in one story can bleed over into the others. The most famous story is now “Brokeback Mountain” because nothing promotes a book like the movie. (For the record, “Brokeback Mountain” is one of the book’s best.) It chronicles a love affair between two cowboys over a twenty-year period. “The Half-Skinned Steer” was in John Updike’s Best American Short Stories of the Century, which makes me realize that, at this point, I usually like authors John Updike likes (as well as his work), but I usually disagree with the stories he picks. My pick from Close Range is “A Lonely Coast.” It has one of the best symbolic hooks I’ve read:

You ever see a house burning up in the night, way to hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You’ll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull off the road to close your eyes or look up at sky punched with bullet holes. And you might think about the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don’t give a damn. They are too far away like everything else.

The year I lived in that junk trailer in the Crazy Woman Creek drainage I thought Josanna Skiles was like that, the house on fire in the night that you could only watch.

One of Proulx’s strengths is her word use. Either she’ll conjugate a word in a new or uncommon way or she’ll use a common word in an uncommon way. As a whole, the writing just feels right and there’s no need to run to the dictionary every page. She’s not abusing her lexicon just to sound smart. With that said, these obscure uses are not enough to keep the reader interested until the next word juke. Additionally, there’s a similarity to the stories (yeah, I know, they’re all about Wyoming and that style of life), but not in a good way. Often times, I found myself at the end of the page, realizing I didn’t absorb any of it, and was unwilling to go back and try again. Still, the stories that hit, hit well. Then again, maybe John Updike has a different opinion. Two stars.

Before Brokeback Mountain gets taken entirely out of context, take a look at Annie Proulx's Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the collection in which the story is featured. If you've seen the movie but have yet to read the story, I suggest you begin here. If you've already read the story by itself, come back to this collection entire. While Diana Ossana (one of the movie's produces & screenwriters) came across it in the New Yorker and felt inspired to write a screenplay, the story itself does not simply stand alone. Certainly it can be read on its own - each story in Close Range probably can. Characters don't reappear in other stories, nor are they connected through some precise, intricate web-work that is all neatly laid out in the end. But these stories do a strange, concentric dance, each upon the other. And "Brokeback Mountain" comes last - not first, and not alone. There is a reason for this. The richness of "Brokeback Mountain," the fullness of the story, is somewhat lost without the other stories that come before it. That may seem impossible given how beautiful the story is already, but it's true. That's part of the magic of literature, and testament to Annie Proulx's excellent writing, which is beautiful, both tender and harsh, relentless as the land she writes about. These stories are all about loneliness, about work, about love, all of which is washed out by "the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that."

"Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that." (99)

Annie Proulx creates some very convincing characters and stories. Her descriptions and sentences often make me reread and analyze them, how amazing her metaphors and deep her imagery. She is an extremely talented writer.

All of these stories are steeped in Wyoming culture, life and lore. The collection starts out very strong, and ends even stronger, although somewhere in the middle (while toying with urban legends and different narrative mechanisms), she loses her way a little. All in all, these stories are surprising, touching, contemplative, and philosophical.

Favorites are the classic "Brokeback Mountain" (the only story I had previously read), "The Mud Below," "Pair a Spurs", "The Half-Skinned Steer" (one of John Updike's picks for best short stories of the century).

These stories are like Wyoming herself: "You don't leave until you have to." (190)

Is your will to live too strong? Your outlook too sunny? Are you quite interested in all the various gruesome ways that people can die on ranches in Wyoming? If so, this is the book for you!

It's very well-written, and Brokeback Mountain is truly wonderful. However, this is certainly the most depressing thing I have ever read in my life.

Brokeback Mountain is one of my favorite movies, based partly on Ang Lee's direction, Michelle William's quietly desperate portrayal of Alma, and the pervasive, true sadness that infuses the film from start to finish. The film stays true to the short story, while blunting a few moments of physicality that didn't seem to me like they would translate well to the screen. The story is nearly perfect: terse, emotional, and poetic. The fault is mine for not following my long-held axiom "Always read the book BEFORE the movie." Well it's not always possible, and this might be a rare exception where the film is better, but the story is worth checking out. Also, I tried to read the others in Proulx's collection and provided evidence for another theory of mine: I am too stupid to understand "smart" things. So I'm going to skip the remaining stories and find something to read with dragons or spaceships or celebrities related to Star Wars.