So glad I finally got around to reading this collection. Absolutely stunning

Contains the stories:

The Half-Skinned Steer -
The Mud Below -
Job History -
The Blood Bay -
People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water -
The Bunchgrass Edge of the World -
Pair a Spurs -
A Lonely Coast -
The Governors of Wyoming -
55 Miles to the Gas Pump -
Brokeback Mountain - 4/5 - the stirring film version is very similar to the short story of two men who find themselves attracted to each other in spite of the world they live in

Long dirge in eleven short stories , the last’ “Brokeback Mountain,” being best. The Wyoming range is a hard place, bleak. You take what joy you can find with gratitude, not knowing what will come next.

This author is a magnificent writer but the stories are so bleak. The land is hard, the people are hard, the history is hard, the present is hard. This land sounds starkly beautiful to look at but has been repeatedly violated and the people are barely hanging in there while the rich walk off with anything of value. At least that is what I get from reading Annie Proulx. I've never been to Wyoming myself, I would like to see and experience it even if my experience only goes tourist deep. My favorite stories were the one where the man thought his horse ate a cowboy, and the one of the beautiful, scary spurs. All the stories were amazing though, so visceral.

let's be clear, brokeback mountain gets 5 stars no question about it. the rest i didn't love - the mud below and the half-skinned steer i thought were pretty good, the rest i struggled through.

Proulx is so good she can make me like short stories. So good she can make her words almost poetic in their beauty about Wyoming - a place where the inhabitants need to be tougher than their environment. It is a bleak hardscrabble world with only the grimmest sort of humour.

As other reviewers have mentioned, Brokeback Mountain is the outstanding tale - a love story of surprising tenderness. & I find Job History oddly flat - I'm sure it was deliberate & I have missed some subtle nuances.

An awesome achievement.

There are twelve short stories in this collection of Wyoming stories by Annie Proulx.

There are two stories that I loved and that are also renowned. The first is:

1. The Half-Skinned Steer - this story made the 100 best of the 20th Century Short Stories collection edited by John Updike. The protagonist returns to Wyoming and foolishly underestimates the extent of the isolated roads and winter blizzards. This is probably the best of the stories in describing the scenery and imagery of the state.

2. Brokeback Mountain - this is a six star story hands down and hits a home run on every level. The affair between Jack and Ennis is so visceral, beautiful, painful, tragic and vivid. It is one of those very rare stories that is so masterfully wrought that this reader became so immersed and forgot it was fiction. It is impressive how much Proulx was able to convey in just thirty pages.

4 stars. Read it for Brokeback Mountain if nothing else.

Asså överlag helt ok MEN jag älskar verkligen Brokeback Mountain (fy så sorglig den är, blir ju helt gråtfärdig) så den gjorde det verkligen värt att läsa alla de andra novellerna också.

Excellent. I usually react a bit badly to the faux-naif voice, which she slips in and out of. But eventually the overwrought language began to seem just exuberant. And the tragedies of the stories were more celebratory than painful: these characters push almost joyfully toward their doom. (Christ, I loved "The Blood Bay," the little yarn that stops long before the characters get whatever it is they have coming.) The leaping language that stops every once in a while to use their voice -- "Pair A Spurs" -- was too busy doing delightful things like comparing landscapes to meat (she loves to compare landscapes to meat) for me to be angry at it for condescension.

Besides, the characters are drawn so big that you can't feel Proulx is condescending to them; they all get crazy names (the Wyoming friends in Proulx's introduction are all named Bill or Tom or Kathy, but Wyoming ranchers in her story are all named Sheets or Car or Hondo or Leecil or Rollo or Pake Bitts) and hurl themselves into their lives, which are so violent and greasy that you feel Proulx is keeping you always apart from them, and this distance lets you appreciate their deaths as appropriate and satisfying. Until "Brokeback Mountain."

She sets "Brokeback Mountain" up with a one-page gleeful jack-o-lantern of a story called "55 Miles to the Gas Pump," about the necrophiliac serial killer Rancher Croom jumping off a cliff. into which Proulx is able to pack more pure sense of fun than any other writer could in a story about suicide, serial killing and necrophilia. After "55 Miles to the Gas Pump," and the whole book, in which you're drawn in to the desperate, longing interiors of implausibly hard people and their dingy, bleak ranch lives, "Brokeback Mountain" releases all the restraint she's built up over the book's arc: Jack and Ennis are absolutely real, unexaggerated, and you're allowed no distance from them and their suffering. She makes the suffering unbearably beautiful, where lots of writers make it just unbearable.

Ich wollte eigentlich die ganze Zeit vier Sterne geben, weil ich alle Geschichten gern gelesen habe und die Erzähltechnik gut fand, es wird nicht zu viel und nicht zu wenig gesagt. Bei den meisten hatte ich bis kurz vor dem Schluss noch keine Ahnung, wo die Geschichte hinsteuert und worum es letztlich gehen würde. Aber am Ende hatte ich doch die wortkargen Männer in karierten Hemden satt, und speziell "Brokeback Mountain", die letzte Geschichte im Buch, fand ich unplausibel, sowohl die "wahre ewige Liebe fürs Leben"-Idee als auch die Dialoge und dramatischen Gesten.

Luin aiemmin tällä viikolla Proulxin Wyoming-sarjan viimeisen osan, nyt tämän ensimmäisen. Siinä missä Näin on hyvä -kokoelma hurmasi ja vei mukanaan, jätti tämän tarinat hieman etäiseksi. Näitä puuttui se myöhempien novellien yllätyksellisyys ja oivaltavuus jota erityisesti rakastin, vaikka toki karu cowboy-elämä samaa olikin. Tarinallisesti epätasaisempi joskin kielellisesti taidokas kokoelma tämäkin. Ja Brokeback Mountain pelasti paljon, siitä subjektiiviseen lukukokemukseen vielä yksi tähti muiden päälle.

Proulx's novels—That Old Ace in the Hole and The Shipping News are particular favorites—can be marvelously multilayered, giving characters room to stretch out and offering a variety of experiences and narratives. By contrast, her short stories too often feel like Cliff's Notes for novels, condensing entire lifetimes to a handful of pages by eliminating everything that makes storytelling human. The flinty, hardscrabble characters in Close Range stoically endure flinty, hardscrabble lives, checking off birth/school/work/death markers on sparse ranches in unforgiving weather, surrounded by partners and family members stoically enduring their own flinty, hardscrabble lives, just waiting for one of Proulx's signature gruesome deaths to bring things to a close. One story, titled "Job History," literally boils down a family's entire existence to a few pages of summary, told in a biblical cadence, lacking only bullet points to make it self-parody.

The collection concludes with "Brokeback Mountain," which is a perfect story, of course, but after the other flinty, hardscrabble narratives, even that one seems irritatingly spare. It's as though Proulx's Wyoming is a whole state of Ennis Del Mars.

And yet: Even self-parodic Proulx is extraordinarily readable. Her sentences sparkle. If one reads slowly enough, one begins to conjure inner lives for some of these flinty, hardscrabble characters. Read one story at a time, Close Range can be a terrific palate cleanser.