Close Range: Collins Modern Classics

Michael Knight "The Wall Street Journal"
Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms.

"The New York Times" Powerful...Read [the stories] for their absolute authenticity and their language, a wry poetry of loneliness and pain.

"Outside" magazine A major achievement in American fiction -- a gorgeous, deeply affecting adventure in stylistic plenitude, prose clarity, and hearts laid bare.

"The Boston Globe" Few writers feel equally at home in the novel and the short story...[these stories] are tough as flint and on occasion breathtaking; together they stand with Proulx's best work.

"People" As she rips away our romantic notions of the West, Proulx asks how capable any of us are of outrunning our origins. Her fatalistic answer, in these stories, adds up to some breathtaking reading.

Carolyn See "The Washington Post Book World"
It's the prose, as much as the inventiveness of the stories here, that shines and shines. Every single sentence surprises and delights and just bowls you over.

Anna Mundow "New York Daily News
Close Range" is not one long dirge simply played in eleven different keys. Each story presents a subtle change of mood and each character inhabits a particular world, a world that Proulx constructs with graceful, devastating sentences.

Jill Vejnoska "Atlanta Journal-Constitution"
Annie Proulx isn't easy. Little she writes about smacks of the familiar. Where so many successful authors strive to create worlds that are instantly, even comfortably, recognizable to readers, Proulx goes where few others would. It isn't easy, but "Close Range" is definitely worth it.

Richard Eder "The New York Times Book Review"
Geography, splendid and terrible, is a tutelary deity to the characters in "Close Range." Their lives are futile uphill struggles conducted as a downhill, out-of-control tearaway. Proulx writes of them in a prose that is violent and impacted and mastered just at the point where, having gone all the way to the edge, it is about to go over.

Michael Upchurch "The Seattle Times Book Review"
Her characters -- stoical, hardheaded, yet willing to be ravaged by the closest available passion whenever the chance presents itself -- crackle and cavort on the page. Served up a full array of life's wayward ecstasies and gut-twisting losses, they resign themselves, in true Proulx fashion, to the damage that loss and ecstasy do....Amen to that, and amen to this book.

Contents

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