Close Range

It was her voice that drew you in she could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire That refers to a character in one of the stories, but is just as applicable to Proulx herself.This is a collection of short stories of Wyoming ranchers, including Brokeback Mountain It s a harsh environment and a harsh life men and women alike have to be tough Wyos are touchers, hot blooded and quick, and physically yearning Maybe it s because they spend so much time handling livestock.There are few sympathet [...]

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 mythi [...]

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 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 ani [...]

Tell you what, them queer cowboys like to broke my heart Annie Proulx, I wish I knew how to quit you.Your strange mix of roughed up realism and supernatural does something to my insides It s too much for ordinary sentence structure Pours out all over the confines of punctuation, seeping into my subconscious until I m drunk and reeling reading just a sentence then a few paragraphs and soon the whole story to anyone who ll listen And still I want .

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 e [...]

A truly wonderful book, that I don t mind telling you made me cry like a baby Nobody leaves Wyoming unless they have to, Annie Proulx I m pleased I waited until I had to leave Wyoming to read this book, despite it stirring powerful feelings of homesickness I had encountered 1 2 Proulx stories in the New Yorker before now, I had loved the film version of Brokeback Mountain, and of course, I lived in Laramie for a decade where Proulx is something of a quiet celebrity.The passage quoted below, from [...]

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 sta [...]

I absolutely love E Annie Proulx She does that thing with words that makes me go all dissociated from the world around me and live inside the world she creates I am almost always disturbed by her stories but I can t stop reading them In fact, her writing is so good that when I saw Brokeback Mountain which I saw before I read her short fic on which it was based , I didn t think it was a great story until I read her actual story There is ONE line in her piece that makes the story GREAT which was i [...]

Uneven, yet generally interesting collection of eleven stories Brokeback Mountain is the one with a movie adaptation and you can see why It s one of the best stories of the bunch taut, well written, emotionally complex At her best, you could reasonably compare Proulx to Flannery O Connor masterly writers of the grotesque and lonesome.

I m 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 b [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

La realt non mai un granch utile da queste parti Anonimo allevatore di bestiame Con queste laconiche parole poste ad epigrafe si apre questa raccolta di racconti di Annie Proulx E trovo che non ve ne siano di pi azzeccate per cominciare a parlarne.Invaghitami della copertina di questo libro che ,ohim , nella mia edizione, non codesta, ma questa shop.bcdeditore images P 88 Che purtroppo ho trovato in versione micro , ma pu essere riassunta come solitario e sperso cavallo ,ai bordi di un recinto, [...]

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 reminis [...]

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 g [...]

The conventional wisdom in short stories, I feel, is that they encompass short periods of time and examine the profound significance of small events The stories in Close Range, however, seem to take the opposite approach lifetimes are squeezed into ten or twenty pages, the distilled essence of memories are arranged like objects on a table that, taken together, capture the undercurrent of entire lives In this way they read like novels that have been boiled down, their steam piped through an alemb [...]

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 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 [...]

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 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, b [...]

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 some [...]

This is such a beautifully written book The prose is so well crafted and polished until it shines Annie Proulx s subtle mixture of the character s voice and local dialect and slang with her own elegiac descriptions is a great example of free indirect style She is amazing at describing landscapes and summing up people in a few sentences and she s good at the subtlety of smell all these cattle ranchers pong My favourite stories were Brokeback Mountain but you kind of imagine the story with the act [...]

Should actually be subtitled Why Not to Live in Wyoming Seriously, this is one of the most depressing collections of short stories I ve ever encountered Which is not to say they re not good, just that I d kind of like to challenge Proulx to write a bit of light comedy or something Brokeback Mountain is the best, and I actually find the story much evocative and powerful than the film Not that Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger making out is anything to sneeze at, mind Still, I m glad I got a copy [...]

This was a really amazing collection of short stories I had several favorites throughout the book, and I was genuinely surprised that the length of the story didn t really matter to me My favorite story, Job History, was only 10 pages The Bunchgrass Edge of the World and Pair a Spurs were other favorites I think that Proulx is an excellent writer with a pretty much limitless imagination Among the other things that surprised me was the variety in the stories They didn t read like of the same at [...]

There are two volumes of Wyoming Stories I m pretty excited about that

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 fas [...]

These stories capture the hard edge of the rural West This is the land and its natural brutality crushing and pounding into human emotions Indeed the land hits from close range.

Really lovely, really kind of subtly tremendous with both its people and its place It s just the kind of thing I want to read It s how to be in love with a place that will eat you alive.Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared 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 People In Hell Just Want a Drink of Water In my quest to read the books my favorite authors have read, chalk up another wi [...]

A book like this causes its reader to thank God, unironically and humbly, for allowing her to come across it.A few lucky accidents brought Close Range into my hands First, we caught the last half of a very edited for tv Brokeback Mountain, flipping channels after a long, hot mid Atlantic day When I got back to Los Angeles, I mentioned to my sister that I wanted to read Brokeback Mountain, the story She had to return some books anyway, so the next evening the book was in my hands, as if it had wi [...]

Not to get like I just ate a bag full of madeleines, but to square the memory of a thing with the broader narrative that thing played in your life is an impossible difficulty inevitably the knowledge of the cliff to come imprints itself on your recollection of the road leading to it I ve been drinking The point is, I really quite liked this book, but my second Proulx Accordion Crimes, as it happens I found at once so comically awful and peculiarly reminiscent of this that I now struggle to gin u [...]

Exceptional writing I must try the Shipping News next.

Close Range is Annie Proulx s anthology of 11 ranch cowboy themed short stories, including Brokeback Mountain I have to say, that there were a lot of good stories in here, not just the last one I was suprised by the book in a few ways, not least being that I enjoyed every one of them, than I thought I would But I was mostly suprised by the dirty gritty realness of the scenes and the writing I suppose I was expecting a sort of idyllic happy set of cowboy stories I m not sure why , but this is to [...]