It's an interesting thing that Proulx is plainly a capable and accomplished writer, with beautiful phrases and observations, but has produced such an inaccessible collection of stories. I read The Shipping News back when it was the it book and didn't understand any of it, but wasn't confident enough to say so. Now 30 years later, let me speak up here.

Proulx writes in vernacular, and in dialect, and in shorthand, omitting whacking big sections of context and backstory. Apart from the fact that I am listening to jargon, I often have not the first idea what is being discussed, and as I am not reading it for a grade, lack the interest and patience to go back and decode and dissect whatever meaning is intended. Lovers of Sam Shepherd prose will feel right at home.

A better reason for passing on this collection is that every (every) story catalogues misery, misfortune, decadence, and a vague pastiche of junior high-level intellect and hazy morality, often at the hands of the Wyoming wilderness and overall gestalt. It was quite a slog.

However the work is an absolute masterclass in the naming of characters. If there's a better collection of character names, I'd like to see it.

4.5 stars for the writing style. Just stunning. 3 stars just because the content got a little repetitive reading all of them in order.

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."

Once again, Annie Proulx proves she's got bigger balls than most of the male writers out there.
Whether they're roping, ranching, or riding the rodeo, the characters in these tales are all tough, hard-living people who do what needs to be done and don't spend a lot of time whining about it.

Some of their exploits made my mouth drop open:

n  Their endurance of pain was legendary. When a section of narrow mountain trail broke away under Marion's horse, the horse falling with him onto rocks below, the animal's back broken and Marion's left leg, he shot the horse, splinted his own leg with some yucca stalks and his wild rag, whittled a crutch from the limb he shot off a scrub cedar, and in three days hopped twenty miles to the Shiverses' place, asked for a drink of water, swallowed it, pivoted on the cedar crutch, and began to hop toward the home ranch, another seven miles east, before George Shivers cajoled him into a wagon. Shivers saw then what he missed before--Marion had carried his heavy stock saddle the distance.n

These are leathery-skinned, no-nonsense people. They don't sit around in drumming circles, talking about their feelings. Even the womenfolk are super tough:

n  When the youngest girl, Mabel, was a few months old they made a journey into Laramie, the infant howling intolerably, the wagon bungling along, stones sliding beneath the wheels. As they crossed the Little Laramie Mrs. Tinsley stood up and hurled the crying infant into the water. The child's white dress filled with air and it floated a few yards in the stiff current, then disappeared beneath a bower of willows at the bend. The woman shrieked and made to leap after the child but Horm Tinsley held her back. They galloped across the bridge and to the river's edge below the bend.
Gone and gone.n

Gulp!

See what I mean? This lady writer has got cojones. Big ones.

Even one of her characters admits: n  "Anyway, you're comin a the bull sale. And I'll give you a pointer you don't want to forget. Scrotal circumference is damn important."n

Never stop learning.

Με ελάχιστες λήψεις της κάμερας η Proulx μάς στέλνει έντεκα καρτ ποστάλ απ’ το Wyoming· τη γη του Yellowstone, των ράντσων, του Τραμπ, του βρωμόκρυου.

Ένας φράχτης του οποίου οι πάσσαλοι  συγκλίνουν καθώς πλησιάζουν το σημείο φυγής, μία ανορθόγραφα γραμμένη ταμπέλα με κάποιο σύνθημα για τη μακρινή Ουάσιγκτον, τοπία άγρια, χαρακωμένα  από τα στοιχεία της φύσης, όπως τα πρόσωπα των χαρακτήρων της Proulx.

Με αυτούς τους χαμένους στο πουθενά χωριάταρους ασχολείται η συγγραφέας, περισσότερο εξωτικούς στα μάτια μου κι από κατοίκους της Πολυνησίας – αγενείς αγρίους με καραμπίνες, ελάχιστα χρήσιμες για άμυνα απέναντι στις απανωτές γκαντεμιές.

Χωρίς να μου δώσει την ανατριχίλα του postcards, η γραφή της Proux είναι το ίδιο αληθινή με το πρώτο της μυθιστόρημα. Για κάποιο λόγο μου θυμίζει ένα φθαρμένο φανελένιο  πουκάμισο που μπορεί να μην είναι για μόστρα αλλά που το κρατάς και το αγαπάς, χωρίς να μπορείς να εξηγήσεις στον εαυτό σου το γιατί.. 

“Η πορεία της ζωής του έμοιαζε πιο αργή απ’ το μαχαίρι, αλλά σίγουρα το ίδιο σχολαστική. Υπήρχαν και άλλα στη ζωή, υπέθετε, κι άκουσε πάλι τη βραχνή, φορτισμένη φωνή της να λέει “Τα πάντα”. Όλα ήταν μια σκληρή, γρήγορη κούρσα που κατέληγε στη λάσπη. Πέρασε ένα καρβουνιάρη μες στο σκοτάδι, τα πυκνά ορθογώνια των βαγονιών να γλιστράνε στο λουλάκι της νύχτας, κι άλλο ένα, κι άλλο ένα, κι άλλο ένα.” 105

Annie Proulx, adopt me.

fantastic short stories.
highlights include: "The Mud Below", "Job History", "The Blood Bay", "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water", "Pair a Spurs", "A Lonely Coast", and "Brokeback Mountain".

It's well written but every story is depressing. It seemed like 'Brokeback Mountain' was the only cheerful one because it was sort of a love story.

I wasn't very familiar with Annie Proulx before I read this book. The writing is impressive, but it was just too depressing. I feel that I gave her a good college try--but I probably won't read more of her work. The world she writes about has no joy, no humor, no playfulness. Frankly, I'm not interested in that world.

If you already know why Annie Proulx rox ur fuckin face off, then I don't know why you're reading a review instead of the book itself. It's Annie Fuckin Proulx. Read it, you bastard.

Proulx gets away with all the shit that no one else could. A grab bag of voices, all unlikely, that switch mid-sentence; stories that end long after the first narrative arc dead-ended and long before the second gets off the ground; nonsensical lines that don't mean squat no matter how you squint but sure sound purdy.

She gets away with this because she's Annie Fuckin Proulx, she has the best sentence-level action since Henry James, every character is tenderly human and nothing, not one goddamn thing, is throw-away.

I appreciated this almost as well as the third in her collection of “Wyoming Stories”,  Fine Just the Way It Is . There is a lot of variety among the eleven stories, but it has cohesion from the Wyoming setting and common struggles of people there to achieve their dreams, whether it’s ranching or rodeo bull riding. They keep you on your toes, as some stories end with a bang and others with a whimper, some stay coast downward in gritty reality and others break into the fantasy of a ghost story or mythic shaggy dog tale.

Like most other readers, my favorite story is the one with the most emotional draw, “Brokeback Mountain.” I am not usually a fan of short stories because I always seem to want more. But the compression of this form has some special power to wallop you by forcing your own imagination to fill in the blanks. Having seen the long lingering scenes of the movie spoiled some of that power of the story for me. Still, it was wonderful to experience the narrative version of some of the more powerful points of the tale (the first embraces, the mad kiss on reuniting years later in the eyesight of Ennis’ wife, and the poignant scene at the end when Ennis visits Jack’s boyhood room). It really seems that the world was waiting for this account of gay men out of synch with the manly world of the West, and it seems quite an achievement for a woman to pull off with such power and economy

The other story that moved me the most was the one about the bull-rider, Diamond Felts in “The Mud Below”. I could identify with the allure of rodeo glory from the dreams of my fellow students where I grew up in a tiny town in Oklahoma, where the only other prospect seemed to be working in an oil refinery. Proulx makes you empathize with Diamond’s pitiful home life and his attraction to the drug of success at rodeo riding. As the seedy parts of that life begin to take hold, empathy turns to pity, and then, wham, his treatment of women reveals the tip of the iceberg in the form of the monster in his heart. It makes me want to sing: “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. Let them be doctors and lawyers and such”:

He almost always has a girl in the motel bed with him when he could afford a motel, a half-hour painkiller but without the rush and thrill he got from a bullride. There was no sweet time when it was over. He wanted them to get gone. …
There was no one in his life to slow him down with love. Sometimes riding the bull was the least part of it, but only the turbulent ride gave him the indescribable rush, shot him with mainline with crazy-ass elation. In the arena everything was real because none of it was real except the chance to get dead.

The big draw for me with this book is not in the quirky plots but Proulx’s writing style, which other people either love or hate. If you want to get a real earful from the latter camp, check out B.R. Myers’  A Reader's Manifesto: An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose . He is not happy with how she will unroll a clashing nest of metaphors like a machine gun (to use a metaphor). I find the technique exhilarating, somewhat like the energy that burst forth at a poetry slam. Judge for yourself:

"The Half-Skinned Steer" (which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, in November of 1997), starts with this sentence: ‘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.’ Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit, but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe "unraveling" didn't sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors continue, with kicked down—which might work in less crowded surroundings, though I doubt it—and hinge, which is cute if you've never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns. And this is just the first sentence!

At the bottom of his carping is an argument that her efforts at style interfere with immersion in the story:
… after a while the reader stops trying to think about what the metaphors mean. Maybe this is the effect that Proulx is aiming for; she seems to want to keep us on the surface of the text at all times, as if she were afraid that we might forget her quirky narratorial presence for even a line or two.

My objection to this is that her wordplay for me doesn’t call attention to the writer’s presence any more than a jazz riff interferes with hearing the music instead of imagining the composer. By analogy, you could say Picasso was a stylist with a lot of focus on surface forms, but that doesn’t interfere with the narrative impact in the case of the civilian bombing in his “Guernica.” To use another metaphor, the beginning sentence quoted above seems to me like dancing with abandon out on thin ice before letting the reader sink through into the story. Works for me.

Just could not get into the stories in this book. Read the first two, the last one (Brokeback Mountain), then put it down.

Salty, expansive - Annie is the queen of compression. She can write 30 pages of prose with enough story to inspire a 2 hour film.

If you've ever peered at a figure standing all the way on the horizon, that's the distance Annie has from her characters. She's god above, watching human suffering and depravity with a wry smile and a touch of melancholy on her face.

These stories are funny, they hurt, they sometimes confuse with their novel-size number of characters to keep track of. This is a heartening reminder that our best work is long ahead of us twenty-somethings - I pray to be spitting this hard in my 60s.