definitely a mixed bag,some of the early ones were super interesting, the middle slogged on a bit all bummers, and then brokeback mountain :,) all of them beautifully written and huge credit to annie proulx’s writing because brokeback mountain is a movie with very little dialogue and much of the dialogue (from my memory) is taken directly from the story. overall rich in landscape and tragedy and people trying their best in a place where it will never be enough. wow.

also made me never want to go to wyoming <3

Annie Proulx is particularly good at two things above all. The first is her evocation of the unrelenting and all pervasive bleakness of her vision of the West, a simmering brutality which extends beyond human violence into the landscape itself. In Proulx's Wyoming, things burst, break, split, punch, sour, rust, sling, hang, begrime, callous, snarl, and sicken with such frequency that it is little surprise when environmental brutality ruptures into acts of extraordinary human cruelty--not surprising, but shocking nonetheless. The Faulknerian reveal at the heart of 'People in Hell just want a drink of water'--one of the strongest stories in the collection, one which rightfully has a place in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers--manages to both burst from nowhere, and yet be totally preordained; in a world so numbed to violence and hardship, how else could such a story end?

Of course, the other great talent of Proulx's is naming. Josanna Skiles? Pake Bitts? Ras Tinsley? Oakal Roy? Bewd and Leecil? I struggle to think of another writer whose ability to produce such alien and yet familiar sounds--something more guttural than a name--and which fit the characters so well could compare to Proulx. Some brutal but sparingly beautiful prose here.

Brokeback mountain was the best one. Her imagery!! Is so beautiful, it took me so long to read and understand and process all of the sentences. Like poetry, like butter

This is a set of modern folktales. A lot of the tales are sort of frightening. Proulx has a bitter, tasty, dark humor. Most of the characters are lonely and miserable.

Proulx is a writer like McCarthy who manages to fit in a great deal of mechanical detail that somehow makes the story more gripping and immediate, instead of causing it to lag. The difference between Proulx and McCarthy (as fierce, modern writers of westerns) is that McCarthy can write convincingly about the punishing violence of the west, but he wants to remain romantic and charming about it, while Proulx is not interested in being romantic - she cuts right through the bullshit.

Finally, do not let the famous movie based on one of the stories in this book keep you from reading. The corny soap opera released in theaters as 'Brokeback Mountain' is nothing like the story in this book. For one thing, it doesn't have Heath Ledger doing a strange, mumbling impersonation of Yosemite Sam, or Anne Hathaway in garish old person prosthetics, or the tear-jerking machinations of a glorified Lifetime movie. Like I said, Proulx is not sentimental, the 'Brokeback Mountain' in this book is very sad and real. Surprisingly, it is the most realistic (in the 'realism' sense) story in the collection, a lot of the other tales have innovative surrealist and even magical elements. Basically, every story in this book is good and they all end good too.

This book made me a woman and then made me a man, and then made me feel like I was on the receiving end of an angry fist at a bar fight but also that I still had punches to throw myself. Violence + passion.

I don’t know what to say besides I miss camping and trekking a lot right now. I want to walk barefoot in the snow.
Or at least wake up in the cold, dry mountain air and smell a fire or the wet shade of a pine forest. I want to get in my car and drive all night all freakin night until the dawn happens somewhere far from here and I have to grab my hat from the wind. Somewhere you can feel ~the land~ and ~the wind~ and where there’s a creaky old attic, some dusty western place where coffee is made in blue ceramics that have turned black from use. I miss the sky in Texas. It’s different idc what they say.

The suffering and loneliness contained within these stories is a powerful brew...the barren and exposed humanity is not to be taken likely, but it is worth it.

One of my greatest reading joys is being transported to another place just by opening a book. It's magic! That's the case with this extraordinary collection of short stories by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx that all take place in Wyoming, a state with hardscrabble land and sturdy, strong-willed people. You'll see the wind-blown bouncing tumbleweed, feel the eddies of dust coat your skin, hear the hordes of trilling grasshoppers, and marvel at the sight of redtails cruising across the gray, storm-laden sky. Welcome to Wyoming.

Each story features an odd and fascinating cast of characters unlike anyone I have ever met in my life. They are hardened ranch hands, daring rodeo bull riders, gritty cowboys, lonely but strong women, and even one former business executive from California who moves to Wyoming to await the apocalypse. None of them have much money, but all of them have ideas—some wackier than others.

But the genius of this book is Annie Proulx's writing. Her terse sentences, harsh descriptions of the weather and landscape, and the rough, course, and fierce characters she brings to life with their colorful dialogue truly make it FEEL like Wyoming. Using nouns, adjectives, and verbs, she magically takes her readers to this surreal, remote, and isolated environment. These powerful stories are rough, violent, tragic, and even a bit crude—just like the characters they depict. It all seems so real that you'll want to wipe the dust off your feet when you close the book.

Bonus: The last story in this collection of 11 short stories is "Brokeback Mountain," the inspiration for the 2005 film starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway. I think it's the best in the bunch.

Annie Proulx of the Shipping News and Accordion Crimes knows Wyoming. And she displays it in all its gory glory in Close Range. This collection of short stories isn't always easy to read. There are some rough topics and the stories often have a high component of local slang in their telling. Local mores and culture may be at odds with your values and experiences.

Just start plowing through it and you will be rewarded. For my money, The Mud Below is as good a short story as you are likely to find.

Reading Road Trip 2020

Current location: Wyoming

Nothing much but weather and distance. . .

Well, this is weird, but I'm getting ready to explain to you why Annie Proulx's short story collection of Wyoming ranchers reminds me of Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, about a runaway slave who's haunted by a ghost.

Close Range and Beloved were published twelve years apart, and they don't have any themes in common, so it's quite possible that the writers themselves (were they both still alive) would be surprised by my strange comparison.

In my outspoken opinion, Toni Morrison is the best female writer the United States has ever produced, and I'm officially going to plunk down Annie Proulx right there next to her as a close #2.

(Even if you disagree with my assessment, you'd be hard pressed to categorize either of these authors as anything but “top ten.”).

And yet. . . they are not my favorite female writers and I often find their stories difficult to embrace.

Ms. Morrison's Beloved is so brilliant, it makes me want to yank the author right out of the grave and make her explain herself. I was stunned by the writing in that novel, like something dangled before me that I could never attain, but, when I was done reading it, I gave my copy away so I wouldn't need to see even the spine of the book on the shelf. I hated every page of it; I just wanted the whole story to go away.

This collection of Ms. Proulx's is equally difficult to embrace. The technical quality of the writing makes me want to shake her silly, right down to her boot spurs. Who in the hell do you think you are anyway, lady?? Same problem, though. . . I approached each story with a certain amount of dread, as though each one of these eleven stories represented eleven misanthropic ranchers with their backs turned to me in disinterest.

I don't like to wrestle with my stories, folks. I don't mean that I need to be spoon-fed, but I don't think the burden should be on me to wrestle with the beasts, either.

The stories here aren't equally unapproachable. Some are easier to enjoy than others: “A Lonely Coast,” and “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,” to name two.

And, of course, you've heard of Brokeback Mountain? That one made its debut here, stuck its tongue out at you, then hopped a horse, bareback, and hauled ass toward the other direction.

It's interesting, isn't it, when you are in awe of sentences the flow like poetry off of the page, but you could give a rat's ass about the characters or their fate?

Ms. Proulx happens to be the author of one of my top 5 favorite novels, The Shipping News, and, overall, I can't help but recommend that one far more than this one.

But, the writing here can't be overlooked. The technical quality of this writing is almost unparalleled in American literature, and Wyoming has never had a greater translator.

That summer the horses were always wet. It rained uncommonly, the southwest monsoon sweeping in. The shining horses stood out on the prairie, withers streaming, manes dripping, and one would suddenly start off, a fan of droplets coming off its shoulders like a cape. Ottaline and Aladdin wore slickers from morning coffee to goodnight yawn. Wauneta watched the television weather while she ironed shirts and sheets. Old Red called it drip and dribble, stayed in his room chewing tobacco, reading Zane Grey in large-print editions, his curved fingernail creasing the page under every line. On the Fourth of July they sat together on the porch watching a distant storm, pretending the thick, ruddy legs of lightning and thunder were fireworks.

I wish I had written this.

Whew! Short story collections just don't come with more pedigree than this. The first story was chosen by Garrison Keillor for his collection of best short stories of the year; then John Updike upped the ante by choosing it for his best stories of the century. The last story inspired the Oscar-winning movie Brokeback Mountain. My own favorite is the micro story, barely filling two pages, entitled "55 Miles to the Gas Pump." Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer winning East coaster, has lived in Wyoming and the Northwest for years, and she here shares her own version of Home on the Range, with eleven Wyoming tales of life on the ranches and towns of the high prairie. It is not a pretty picture. Poverty, hardship, deadend lives, pain, intolerance, grueling work, failure. But what prose! The writing is simply gorgeous, with the kind of poetic beauty that explains why people live in these dusty prairie towns and mostly can't imagine life anywhere else. Proulx has invented her own distinctive reproduction of the local idiom that is only marginally intrusive, but is a constant reminder that you are in a foreign land. She says that she struggles with the short story form, but the struggle was more than worth the effort. This is a masterpiece.

I read Close Range years ago, and the experience of re-reading the collection has been somehow deeper. Probably the more you experience 'real life', the more intense the act of reading.

Proulx's landscapes are haunted by loneliness, cruelty and often, hopelessness. The beauty of Wyoming seems terrifying with its emptiness and vastness. The desperation and brutality of its humans more amplified against this never-ending expanse. The writing is pitch perfect - sparse, sharp, never revealing too much, and yet, there are seemingly cryptic sentences that reveal so much that they make you gasp or make you feel this incomprehensible sense of sadness. In Proulx's restrained writing, the emotions still spill out the pages. 

All the stories in this collection are nearly perfect, but Brokeback Mountain is the most perfect of all. I was in high school when the movie came out, still in my 'trying to be heterosexual' stage. Now when I am older, I have discovered so much queer writing and cinema going right back to the 19th century. But during that particular year, Brokeback Mountain was the first 'visible' piece of explicitly queer media. I remember the hushed and often mocking tones in the way my classmates, friends and adults talked about it. Years later, I watched the movie and read the story. It taught me a lot about what writing can be, about myself. The silence in the story and its adaptation saying everything about the pain of existing as yourself. Then in 2023, I watched the theatre adaptation in London with Lucas Hedges and Mike Faist, and was in tears all over again. This story in its various forms has been a sort of companion in my journey to self-discovery.

Close Range might be bleak, too much so at times, but it's also full of such unbearable beauty.

1.5 stars

Hate the writing. Hate the stories. Cool ideas, but I don't gel with Proulx's style.
Sorry, but for class I'mma read Sparknotes.