Rating: 
Summary: not even close, no emotional range
Review: It is hard to imagine these stories being printed if the author hadn't won a Pulitzer Prize for earlier work. The charactors are flat, quickly drawn by highlighting eccentricities and hick-speech patterns. They do not develop, learn, or even make you care because they remain hollow figures devoid of inner life, finely shaded emotions or anything two diminsional. The treatment of the landscape is about the same - while The West and ranching figure in plots, you can not once envision a place from her descriptions or feel its prescence. The only thing that works is a few plots that amble along - but even that only sometimes works: consider the flat drone of a plot such as Job History, which is nothing but a list of jobs held and what was on tv at the time. If you are looking for a book to capture "the west" - whatever your idea of that might be - tough, romantic, whatever - this is not it. If you are looking for a book that is literary and a good read, this is also not it - it is a book that finally is all about the author's own voice - a rather flat and dull voice when you get too close, with no range at all.
Rating: 
Summary: Just OK for My Tastes
Review: The first thing I'm going to say is that I only read half this book. If you wish, you can take that as a commentary on the book, or a commentary on the reviewer. Either way, I suppose it's an indication of something.I read this book, or half of it, because a friend lent it to me out of the blue. Willing as I am to try new things, especially those that gravitate from apparent randomness, I picked it up and gave it the old college try...which is exactly where I felt I was after a few pages. This book brought me back to Expository Writing class from my freshman year in college. This is a collection of short stories that slowly meander, not necessarily with a point, but rich in word energy. I use the expression 'word energy' here because the value in this book is the language, not the tale itself. At least for me this was the case. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. I can't shake the feeling that this collection exists merely for the author to proclaim, "Boy, I miss Wyoming, but it sure does suck." Or something similar, with more descriptive words. Since my freshman year of college was 13 years ago, I'm not being forced to analyze every paragraph to an absurd degree. As such, the stories of this book sort of meander through the plains of Wyoming, gliding from one page to the next, but never going anywhere. I imagine this is perfectly fine for some people, but I feel I'm being led on a walk through a corn field. While some people like to walk in corn fields, it's not my thing. And that's what this book is...or isn't. It isn't my thing. I don't relate to any of these stories; none of them speak to me. I don't think it's bad, per se. But my relation to these anecdotes is almost entirely non-existent. So there you go. To me, it's an average book. And I think it's enjoyably written in some places. But I don't see many of these stories with a direction. They roll, they plod, they wisp. But in the end, they don't go anywhere. Granted, each reader will have their own opinion of how this compilation touches them. And that's the great thing about books. But for me, it wasn't a very enlightening walk.
Rating:
Summary: Sorry Wyoming, we know better.
Review: This sordid, dark, ugly filth is not the Wyoming my grandparents hailed from. I have known many persons from ranches in that state and they are hard working, forthright and resourceful. They may not be saints but they are nothing like this mess. Spend your money on something else, like a nice travel guide to Wyoming and go see for yourself what a rigerous, diverse country this really is. There are fewer people in Wyoming per sq. mile than there are in Alaska as well as a far more diverse wildlife population. The folks there have better things to do than live like this book.
Rating:
Summary: yup.
Review: Annie Proulx's voice lands somewhere between the savagely humorous stories of Flannery O'Connor and the sparse and romantic beauty of Raymond Carver -- which, I suppose, is geographically appropriate.
I am a resident of Wyoming. I am not from here and I do not plan to stay here. I have little love for the barren landscape or the tough people of this land -- I would rather be in a cafe in San Francisco or a coffee shop in Greenwich Village. But I have seen enough of this place to validate the authenticity of Proulx's vision of this land, to a point anyway. Like anyplace, there are more people who watch too much TV and eat too many Oreos than there are who lead these lives of clenched teeth and fists. For being about Wyoming, which they fully are, these stories cover a lot of ground. From the Blood Bay, a wonderfully humorous rewrite of a familiar ranch legend, to a story about a bullrider to anti-beef radical activists to a tractor who makes love to an overweight and lonely girl to the crowning story about two tough cowboys and their unusual love for each other, Annie Proulx's imagination almost makes up for the lack of imagination of everyone else in this state. I will buy this book as a memoir of my year in this barren state. I will recommend this book as an excellent collection of stories from a remarkable writer about a tough land.
Rating: 
Summary: No contrast except in the imagery
Review: Ever since she allowed a happy ending to ruin things in The Shipping News, Annie Proulx has made life miserable for every character she's drawn. If she has an impulse to evoke sympathy for any of them, she conquers it. I present as evidence Accordion Crimes and Close Range. Nothing good happens in these stories except the passing of time and even the passing of time fails to change anything. At the finish of "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," she writes, "That was all sixty years ago and more. Those hards days are finished. ... We are in a new millenium and such desparate things no longer happen." Then she rams home the final line: "If you believe that you'll believe anything." It takes a lot of work to find contrast within any one of these stories. For instance, the first image in "A Lonely Coast" is of a house burning up out on the vast Wyoming plains at night: "And you might think about the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don't give a damn. They are too far away, like everything else." From that happy beginning, the story goes on for 18 pages describing several tiny, confined lives that run together like brown and blue paint, with no logic except gravity; then, bingo, the story ends with an absurd shootout on a highway. The thing about Annie Proulx is her imagery. For example, from "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World": "Aladdin, face like shield, curly hair springing, tipped his head toward the tablecloth, mumbled, 'O bless this food.' Heavy beef slices, encircled by a chain of parsnips and boiled potatoes, slumped on the platter." That is beautiful, how Aladdin tips his head, not toward the platters, the table, the food---no! Toward the tablecloth! That is poetry. Also, as you can see throughout these stories, she connects clauses with commas but with no conjunctions; for example, "Another mudholed lane took him into a traffic circle of commuters sucking coffee from insulated cups, pastries sliding on dashboards. Halfway around the hoop he spied the interstate entrance ramp, veered for it, collided with a panel truck emblazoned STOP SMOKING! HYPNOSIS THAT WORKS!, was rammed from behind by a stretch limo, the limo in its turn rear-ended by a yawning hydroblast operator in a company pickup." Never mind the string of clauses with no conjunctions, what about the last driver? He's yawning, he's a hydroblast operator, he's in the company pickup! That's why I keep reading this depressing stuff of hers, because of the magic show. Who else would have conjured up a yawning hydroblast operator? What's a hydroblast?
Rating:
Summary: A great collect wish they had more than 5 stars
Review: I write and publish short stories and I teach writing.
This is one of the best collections of short stories I have ever read. I give this book to friends who write literary fiction. If I were rich enough I would make sure one of these books was in every library. When history rolls over it, it will be known as a great one.
I have spent time in the inner mountain west she writes from and have spent more time with near and dear and others in my life from that area and going back and forth. This is the real deal, nothing but the real deal, solid, real, gritty, honest, nothing but the truth.
This book touched me both as a writer and a reader and as a person. Despite the craft and envy and analysis my poor overeducated brain constantly subjects this poor book to, when I read it I am always touched as a person. I left the last story with tears in my cynical past middle-aged, Marxist eyes.
I wish they had a special 45 star category, because that is where the book belongs.
Rating:
Summary: Wyoming Stories: a very uneven collection
Review: "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" is the newest collection of short stories by Annie Proulx. With various stories written in various periods of time, Snip: (...).
Rating: 
Summary: A difficult read - at best
Review: Maybe I'm just a simple guy. I don't want to have to concentrate when I read something for pleasure. I just want to... read it. If you skim as you read you'll miss out and have to go back.
Also, her subject matters were distasteful, i.e. the first story about a skinned animal and the final story about two hicks who find out they're homosexuals (I didn't just ruin either of these stories for you.)
In most of her stores, there's no real 'end'. They just sort of go along, and then she gets tired of writing and puts 'the end' and goes on to the next one.
Not a satisfying read at all.
Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking 'anti-western'
Review: This collection of Annie Proulx's short stories is so good I had to keep putting it down, bowled over by the genius of her prose and the virtuoso evocation of places and people hanging on to a bitter living way out beyond the end of their luck. For me it now replaces 'The Shipping News' as Proulx's best work. Although many of the stories are just as macabre, the characters in 'Close Range' have far less of a sense of inevitability to their lives than those in 'Accordian Crimes'. For my money the most frightening story is also the shortest in the collection, the gruesome tale of how people at the end of the earth 'make their own entertainment'. My favourite story of the lot has to be 'Brokeback Mountain', which is the most poignant piece of prose I've read. However, perhaps you have to read the others first to gain this effect - as tragedy piles on tragedy, the poignancy mounts until it is almost too much to bear, but certainly too gripping to leave alone. All in all this collection makes a hugely significant contribution to the genre of 'anti-western', which of course breathes new life into the 'western' myth. Proulx mythologises Wyoming even as she excoriates it. In ancient Greek tragedy, it was the gods who condemned feeble humanity to their evil fate. In 'Close Range', Proulx lets the landscape do their work for them. And unlike Greek tragedy, in 'Close Range' an intensely humane sense of humour is never far below the surface.
Rating:
Summary: Rough and Raw - Just like the Land is
Review: A short story collection that sure deserve attention. First of all, the writing is absolutely impressive. It takes you to Wyoming, takes you there pretty close, beneath an open sky of all possible colors and hard, sunburned land that turn's into dust, when your boots hit it. The stories are refreshingly weird (in a positive way, understood?!), grabbing the reader by his collor and tearing him out of everyday life .... Her [Annie Proulx's] work is a gift. Reading a pleasure, time spent in a purpose, like "the path is the destination". Mighty good read with a literary quality to it that makes your heart pound take up a step and your eyes moving faster over the pages, anxious to devour them. Howdy.
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