Rating: 
Summary: Quirky, evocative, totally original
Review: As a Wyomingite, I had to suspend my defensiveness about how the state and it's people are portrayed. Most Wyomingites probably don't view their beloved state in as grim, desolate, and lonely a light as the stories describe. However, when Proulx writes about the wind, the cold, the sagebrush, the vast expanses that are Wyoming (all of which have their own beauty, just like the mountains, the meadows and alpine lakes), I recognize it immediately as home. The writing is superb, most especially the "flights of fancy". Wyoming is defined by its rugged individualism and lack of patience for greenhorns and liberals (some small pockets of the state aside). Most people here drink coffee, not lattes. "Flights of fancy" aren't commonplace. In my opinion, in many ways Proulx has us dead to rights.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting and entertaining
Review: The people who wrote that this book didn't capture Westerners correctly should return to reading Lonesome Dove. In the same way that not all Easterners are stuck up, greedy, shallow workaholics, not all Westerners are laid-back, generous, kind, tree-hugging environmentalists with a touch of rancher. I've thoroughly enjoyed reading these stories, and have found myself repeating the premises to others and reading passages aloud to my friends. Proulx has the courage to write about things that stir emotions - good - bad - ugly - ridiculous, and thank goodness we live in a country that publishes things that don't always have the formulaic high gloss sparkle on the tooth of a cowboy in a white hat. I have the hardcover with William Mathews' watercolors embedded in the book. They're beatifully rendered. This book is a collector's item as well as a great palatte cleanser.
Rating: 
Summary: Trite. Skillfully rendered sterotypes, nothing more.
Review: Is A. Proulx trying to replay Wm. Faulkner in Wyoming? I'm not surprised this collection appealed to coastal publishers/editors & readers; that some selections were pub'd in Harpers, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly. (Big Grin) Those "city people"...those "Easterners"...WANT to imagine this triteness is true. -ha! After enjoying Proulx's skill in the Shipping News, (which Proulx labored over at The Red Barn retreat near Ucross, Wyoming,) I was vastly disapointed to read this denegration--An insult to Wyoming and the people. She has glomped onto every fictitious sterotype existing about westerners and country people in order to jump on the popular "write about Wyoming" bandwagon rumbling through publishing these days. She even has the audacity to settle in our state and call herself a "native." This fifth-generation Wyoming "native" gives her a hearty Brrrraakkk!!! for this collection that could be jumbled together about any rural people in any cold climate. So what? <<big shrug>>
Rating: 
Summary: Embarrassment to Wyoming's culture
Review: I expected something completely different. Its apparent that this writer has no heart for what country people's values are really about. I read three stories and all have some sort of perverted sexual concept in each. Not all country people are really like this... I was really let down, thinking I had found a good novel written about country living, instead just another dark and sex-realated novel. The stories are great at thoroughly degrading the people of Wyoming. In fact none of her stories really connect with wyoming culture at all.Second, I found it difficult to capture the feeling of the people in the stories. Her writing is good, but she lacks talent at creating and expressing interesting characters, especially the western type. I just couldn't get the feel of them. Maybe its because most all of her characters are dark and twisted. These definitely are not the country people that I know.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent writing skill! Plots: some boring
Review: I still don't understand the point of Half-Skinned Deer! Brokeback Mountain's power, beyond the incredible descriptions of place and people is the way Ennis is changed by the relationship that he devalues. As a writing student, I find Annie Proulx a great example to follow.
Rating:
Summary: one of the best books I have read in many years
Review: Proulx writes that the short story form is difficult for her - her hard work paid off in spades!!! What a wonderful book - a wondrous, poetic, heartfelt collection of real people. I agree with Billman's earlier review - I am buying copies for my friends. I have to share this remarkable experience of reading an author at her absolute best. One story can make you feel you have read a novel about these characters. I can only compare her with Cormac McCarthy, whose All the Pretty Horses I consider one of the greatest books of the 20th century. They both write with heart, and soul about the real West.
Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: After reading this book, I have now given this author three chances to "wow" me. I know I am in the minority here, but I do not like Ms. Proulx's style. Her characters are unappealing and a waste of time to read about. Her stories are loaded with violence and abnormalities. The only story I liked out of this collection was the last one. For a much better author, and stories, on the same themes, I prefer Larry McMurtry.
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: Why has no one mentioned that Close Range is funny?
Review: I have read every book written by Annie Proulx and almost every review available; few of them make much of the humor in all of her books, and Close Range most especially. Read this book for all the reasons mentioned in other reviews-characterization, poetry, description of place, humanity--but read it also for her ability to make you laugh out loud.
Rating:
Summary: Inaccurate, trivial, stupid
Review: Important news item: Not everyone in Wyoming is degenerate and stupid. The author of these stories plain and simple does not know or understand Wyoming. She only wrote what people want to believe. Isn't it interesting everyone in her stories is basically the same,a dissipated bum? Boring after awhile, no?
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