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: A lot of the same
Review: Proulx's style of writing takes some getting used to. I was hoping to enjoy these stories as much as I had enjoyed Accordian Crimes but after a while the stories all started to sound the same to me. She seems to delight in taking a small moment in time (the six seconds to ride a bull at a rodeo) and expand that moment of time out with lots of internal monologue and flash back. While these techniques can be great tools for character development she just doesn't manage much of that in these stories leaving all the stories to bleed together like one disjointed stream of conciousness account of Wyoming.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant sketches of a wild place
Review: This is the first book I've read by Annie Proulx. I picked it up because I read a favorable review of Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, and thought I ought to start with the first collection.
The stories are slices of life of all sorts of people who live mainly in solitude in Wyoming and include some darkly funny tall tales among the more realistic-seeming ones.
I've never lived in Wyoming, although I now live close to it. I know only a couple of people who live there, and they don't really seem to fit the profile of any of the hard-luck, hard-bitten characters in these stories. However, I have driven the dirty, dusty, nameless dirt-and-gravel roads that criss-cross the lonely state. I have seen the landscape, from the endless dry high plains to the majesty of the Medicine Bow and Teton Mountains to the downright bizarreness of Yellowstone Park. As I've bumped along these roads, I've seen lonely outposts -- ranches, shacks, trailers, lean-tos, resort homes -- and have wondered what sort of person tries to scratch out a living in such dusty loneliness. The stories in this book are ones I would have made up driving by those outposts if I were only a little more clever. The characters are drawn simply but sharply by Ms. Proulx's amazing gift of metaphor. This gift extends to her description of the real star of all the stories -- the land. While I may not know Wyoming folks well, I know enough about their land to know that the descriptions of it in this book are spot-on and beautiful.
I recommend this book highly (but maybe not to those with very weak stomachs), and I'm really looking forward to reading more of Ms. Proulx's work.
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.
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