Rating: 
Summary: Best collection of short stories published in an age
Review: Annie Proulx is that rarity: a born short story writer. Many of the stories in Close Range" measure up to anything in the cannon of American literature and overpass most of what is considered great. "The Mud Below" deserves to find its way into every best of the best anthology from here on out. Her feeling for Wyoming (and by extension America) is complete and utterly true. Her genius with metaphor is original yet absolutely accurate. These stories are all electrifyingly honest and the characters in them are people we tend to overlook (at least literary writers do when they are not sentimentalizing them). Proulx gets her people with such uncanny accuracy that they seem more real to me than I do to myself. She's a wonderful writer. Anyone truly interested in Literature must not miss these stories. They are the first thing worthy of the word I have seen for a blue moon. Proulx is the real thing.
Rating: 
Summary: Powerful Language and Landscape Merge in Wyoming...
Review: Annie Proulx has been my favorite author ever since I read The Shipping News for the first time back in '93. Close Range showcases her gift for language and love of landscape. "The Mud Below" and "the Bunchgrass Edge of the World" were two favorites. In Mud, the rodeo life is vividly captured, interweved with the struggle of a single mom to raise her son. In Bunchgrass, the main character, a large, big-hearted girl, is the "embarassment of the family". As the story unfolds, Proulx utilizes an interesting talking tractor (!) and that wide open Wyoming landscape to tell the story of the big girl's lonliness and struggle to find a place in the world. Other stories, such as the well-praised "The Half-Skinned Steer" and "BrokenBack Mountain" highlight diverse themes and vivid characters. Proulx's writing is funny, intense, surprising, fresh and sometimes carries underlying environmental conservation themes. I've read all of her books and short stories. The more I read of her writings, the more I appreciate her literary reach, language and content.
Rating: 
Summary: A little too bleak for my taste ...
Review: I'm not quite sure what to make of this collection. I loved AP's writing style and wanted to be drawn into the stories. However the problem was that once was I was in the stories I wasn't sure I wanted to be there - I found the subject matter a little too depressing - I had imagined stoical countryfolk living bleak but dignified lives against a magnificent, uncompromising landscape. Instead I was a little taken aback by the undignified and squalid behaviour of the charactors and how they all seem doomed to end up unhappy. Surely their are SOME happy marriages/parent-child relationships in this part of the world? I liked 'Brokeback Mountain' but the rest of the stories seemed a bit samey. I've never been to America but based on AP's view of it, I think I would give Wyoming a wide berth!In some ways Ms Prolux reminds me of Thomas Hardy - the same tales of lives predestined to unhappiness against the uncaring splendour of nature - but unlike Hardy she appears to lack a sense of humour/or any compassion for her characters. Her characters have no nobility, hence it becomes difficult for the reader to empathise with their plight.
Rating: 
Summary: Wyoming it ain't
Review: I've lived in Wyoming most of my life, except for college in Princeton and the first part of my career in New York City and San Francisco. I wouldn't say I'm just another redneck in America's Outback. So when I say Annie Proulx's "Wyoming" stories aren't a true reflection of the character and the landscape of a state (or a state of mind, if you will), then you can trust my perspective. Wyoming has always been a place on the way to someplace else; Ms. Proulx is like so many people before her who have lingered here long enough to affect a rather jaundiced view of this place, but not long enough to understand it. I can understand why Ms. Proulx's "Wyoming" is so appealing to uninformed and effete Eastern media and readers; it plays to their fantasies about this place. But add Ms. Proulx's overwrought prose and her dark view of this or any world, and you're going to get a verbose, tangled, inaccessible and ugly portrait. That's OK for her nearly unlovable human characters, but new Western literature is also about surroundings, and in that, her writing fails. A reader who is truly interested in this landscape and wants to see it the way folks live in it is better advised to pick up Ron Franscell's "Angel Fire" or C.L. Rawlins' "Gravity National Park."
Rating:
Summary: Never plumbs the depths, but fabulous imagery
Review: Unlike many of my fellow Wyomingites, I found much to be admired in this collection of short stories and riffs (some stories are too short to be called anything BUT riffs). Ms. Proulx captured the soul-jarring openness of the Great High Lonesome in such a way that makes THIS transplanted Wyomingite long for the prairies and rocks of her native home. It was wonderful to read those vivid and wonderful descriptions. In the scenery, I was brought home. She is equally adept at sketching the surfaces of the people in her tales. I know many of the characters in her books well from my life on a Wyoming ranch. However, she skated over the surface of these lives, never understanding the wonderful mix of hardheaded pragmatism, loving sentimentality, bitter practicality and blinding optimism that makes up the Wyoming character. She views these people with great cynicism and no understanding. And, to be fair to Ms. Proulx, Wyomingites are people that aren't easy to understand, much like the state itself. They show their harsh side to the world, but protect an inner beauty from casual outsiders. Ms. Proulx didn't bother to try to penetrate that harsh exterior, and given her lack of interest in staying in the state (even her bio notes admit she "lives in Wyoming" but spends most of her time away from the state), I doubt she ever will. And that's a shame. I hope she'll take another crack at writing about Wyoming... perhaps in a novel, which is more her forte.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant collection of gripping stories
Review: In some ways it's odd that Annie Proulx achieved such success with her novel The Shipping News, because she is a born short-story writer. This latest collection seems to me her finest work yet, illuminating the dark corners of human nature in language that is lucid, gripping and intense. The stories and the characters found in them are astonishingly vivid and stay in the mind long after reading. Proulx writes about people who generally have no voice in fiction, which is clearly off-putting to some readers. But the emotional truth in her work continues to grip the reader. I'm disappointed to note the number of Wyoming residents who seem distracted by the book's sub-title and feel it should be some kind of travel brochure for the state, and have reviewed it complete with sneers about Easterners. This is literature, not journalism! Fans of beautifully-written, emotionally intense writing should read this book! And also enjoy it for the beautiful watercolors.
Rating:
Summary: Wyoming as a state of the soul
Review: I am a grown-up, middle aged man not drawn much to sentimentality. I am not a practiced reader of fiction and I have spent only one night in Wyoming. I just finished reading the final story in the collection, "Brokeback Mountain",about ten minutes ago. I still have tears in my eyes. It seems to me that I am still falling out of a dream into the wet and chill February morning by San Francisco Bay where I now live. But the dream was of a place utterly familiar. I mean, emotionally familiar, familiar in memory, and evidently, familiar to my body. I can still feel the tingling just behind my cheekbones and the low-voltage electric discomfort in my chest. I guess Annie Proulx touched something in the geography of my own soul with her story. And even in the sadness that swirls around my eyes, I am grateful to her for that. And amazed that this woman could write so tellingly of men's hearts. I said that I am a middle-aged man. So I have a history behind me. That's part of what makes you middle-aged. When you're young, who you want to be someday is the largest part of who you are. When you're middle-aged, the evidence begins to mount. The past is what it was and that is the largest part of who you are. It's harder to make believe anymore. And the story includes loss, confusion, missed opportunities, cowardice, fear, and memories of your own Brokeback Mountain. And sometimes the only redemption for the past, if it is redemption, is to remember it, fully. That's all. Now that I am back in the waking world a bit more, I also want to say that Annie Proulx weaves the English language beautifully, with the kind of strength, color and contrapuntal roughness that makes it so earthy and satisfying. There were a few passages that I read out loud, just for the rhythm, the accents, the tumbled spring-thaw rush of sound. In a story about people not noted either for reflective insight or poetic diction, she has, paradoxically, by her own re-membering of them, let them be themselves, without apology, and yet re-situated them in a place of human grandeur. I guess Aristotle had a point when he wrote about poetry as a moment of katharsis, of the compelling power of pity and fear. I bet he never thought he could find it on Brokeback Mountain.
Rating:
Summary: A Subtle and Unrelenting Comedy
Review: After carefully anylising Proulx character development and precise diction it seems to me that the whether the characters depicted by Proulx capture the spirit of Wyoming is irrelevant. Each of these characters should be taken both in correlation with the setting and also they should be allowed to stand on their own. These characters should serve to titilate by thier absurd responses to life, not to portray an active representation of the Wyoming landscape. Proulx makes a very conscious effort to seperate Wyoming from her characters. If fact you could say that Wyoming could be seen as an individual character. Each character interacts with eachother but they are not to be taken as the same thing.
Rating:
Summary: I Enjoyed It, But Not For Everyone
Review: Well, it amuses me to see all of these reviews by people from the East Coast and Midwest and California telling us here in Wyoming how much this "is" Wyoming or "isn't" Wyoming. It's an entertaining book, it flirts with, and occasionally hits the truth right on the nail head, and it's not the entire picture of Wyoming either. The stories all contain elements of Wyoming, both what it was, and what it still is, but they tend to run towards the dark side, the brutal side, the barren side, both of Wyoming's climate and geography, and of its people. I'm not one of Wyoming's few city dwellers - I live and work with cattle and wildlife every day, I'm out there on the -30 degree days, I see some ugly things and some incredibly beautiful things, and I think that's what resonated with me about this book. I saw my friends and neighbors and enemies in this book, and that's what kept me turning pages. I wish I'd seen a little more of the splendor, the hope, the grace, and the wonder of Wyoming, but what the heck, I didn't write it. Quite a good bit of Wyoming marches to its own drummer, and you can drive miles and miles on most of our roads without seeing other folks, and we like things that way. Enjoy the book or don't, but don't gripe about the kernels of truth in it or your perceived notions about how it's wrong or right about Wyoming from your highrise condo in some eastern city. It's close enough for us born and raised here.
Rating:
Summary: Magic at work here in the truth and lies of "the West".
Review: Brothers Grimm dealt in folklore, myth and truth using language that confronted, that did not hide, say, an act of cannibalism, and revealed in their stories some of our fears, hopes and dreams. Ms Proulx has, in CLOSE RANGE, created a language that reflects the nature of the characters who inhabit this landscape, a language which is cryptic, dense, and evocative and does not hide, say, an act of love between two men. The language is a triumph, sweeping the reader along in its power, immersing the reader in the world of the rancher, cowhand, rodeo riders and sheepherders, their search for love, for money, their recognition of meaning through their work, in a landscape more of a hell than an El Dorado. She can sum a character up in a sentence and there is more than a little humour in the hundreds of proper nouns which sparkle and colour her stories - people like Car, Skipper, Cake, Freeze, Hulse, Haul, and Wrench; places like Brokeback, Fiddle and Bow, Slope, Casper. Vivid characterisations - Mrs Freeze and Ottaline are especially memorable but so are Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar. Issues such as the transformation of the west through tourism and corporate ownership make the stories resonate and the metaphor of the lumbering Cadillac slumping off into a ditch at night in the snow in minus 10 degrees weather may say more about modern man and nature than the collected works of many others.
There is magic at work here, no less than there is in the works of Brothers Grimm, but there's much more too.
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