Annie Proulx - Close Range: Wyoming Stories

Praise for Close Range

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.

Richard Eber, The New York Times Book Review

Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms.

The Wall Street Journal

Its 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.

Carolyn See, The Washington Post Book World

Her charactersstoical, hardheaded, yet willing to be ravaged by the closest available passion whenever the chance presents itselfcrackle and cavort on the page. Served up a full array of lifes 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.

Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times Book Review

Annie Proulx isnt 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 isnt easy, but Close Range is definitely worth it.

Jill Vejnoska, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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.

Anna Mundow, New York Daily News

Blends harsh realism with macabre humor and a touch of the supernatural. Proulx is a masterful storyteller, engrossed by the beauty of Wyoming ranch country.

Judith Wynn, Boston Herald

These Wyoming stories require all five senses. And when you finally rest, your knuckles perhaps bloodied, you see in these stories a life that is fragile and subtle, much like cactuses and desert flowers.

Los Angeles Times

Despite the stumbling lives and untimely deaths that afflict her characters, Proulx is a pure joy to read.

Betsy Willeford, The Miami Herald

The stories here speak with enormous power. They bear the authority of a writer so accomplished and so attuned to the hard-luck characters that she wrenches from their experiences with shivery, majestic beauty.

Dan Cryer, Newsday

Proulxs language does not admit yes, but or really? When it works, which is most of the time, it sweeps aside all ideas, her own and the readers, and allows no response except banging the hands together.

John Skow, Time

The work of a writer who casts a giant shadow over most of the competition. Proulxs prose is magisterial in force.

Vogue

Proulxs folksy stoicism isnt a pose. Her stories are solid oak.... Rustic baroque. Shes a writer who does her thinking by hand, crafting sentences whose specific gravity mysteriously exceeds their size.

Walter Kirn, New York

If youve got the guts for it, cowboy up and read this book, because it is a masterwork, terrifying and gorgeous.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Mirabella

A dazzling collection of eleven stories... the pieces meld seamlessly into each other to create a nuanced portrait of a bleak and windswept world.

Vanessa V. Friedman, Entertainment Weekly

Proulx has written to barbed perfection about the wasted, wanton, often violent characters whose ties to the land form the preternatural heart of these spine-tingling stories.

Lisa Shea, Elle

Gritty, authoritative stories of loving, losing, and bearing the consequences. Nobody else writes like this, and Proulx has never written better.

Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

These stories are for my children

Muffy

Jon

Gillis

Morgan

Realitys never been of much use out here.

Retired Wyoming rancher

I N THE LONG UNFURLING OF HIS LIFE, FROM TIGHT-WOUND kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns. Hed got himself out of there in 1936, had gone to a war and come back, married and married again (and again), made money in boilers and air-duct cleaning and smart investments, retired, got into local politics and out again without scandal, never circled back to see the old man and Rollo bankrupt and ruined because he knew they were.

They called it a ranch and it had been, but one day the old man said it was impossible to run cows in such tough country where they fell off cliffs, disappeared into sinkholes, gave up large numbers of calves to marauding lions, where hay couldnt grow but leafy spurge and Canada thistle throve, and the wind packed enough sand to scour windshields opaque. The old man wangled a job delivering mail, but looked guilty fumbling bills into his neighbors mailboxes.

Mero and Rollo saw the mail route as a defection from the work of the ranch, work that fell on them. The breeding herd was down to eighty-two and a cow wasnt worth more than fifteen dollars, but they kept mending fence, whittling ears and scorching hides, hauling cows out of mudholes and hunting lions in the hope that sooner or later the old man would move to Ten Sleep with his woman and his bottle and they could, as had their grandmother Olive when Jacob Corn disappointed her, pull the place taut. That bird didnt fly and Mero wound up sixty years later as an octogenarian vegetarian widower pumping an Exercycle in the living room of a colonial house in Woolfoot, Massachusetts.

One of those damp mornings the nail-driving telephone voice of a woman said she was Louise, Ticks wife, and summoned him back to Wyoming. He didnt know who she was, who Tick was, until she said, Tick Corn, your brother Rollos son, and that Rollo had passed on, killed by a waspy emu though prostate cancer was waiting its chance. Yes, she said, you bet Rollo still owned the ranch. Half of it anyway. Me and Tick, she said, we been pretty much running it the last ten years.

An emu? Did he hear right?

Yes, she said. Well, of course you didnt know. You heard of Down Under Wyoming?

He had not. And thought, what kind of name was Tick? He recalled the bloated grey insects pulled off the dogs. This tick probably thought he was going to get the whole damn ranch and bloat up on it. He said, what the hell was this about an emu? Were they all crazy out there?

Thats what the ranch was now, she said, Down Under Wyoming. Rollod sold the place way back when to the Girl Scouts, but one of the girls was dragged off by a lion and the G.S.A. sold out to the Banner ranch next door who ran cattle on it for a few years, then unloaded it on a rich Australian businessman who started Down Under Wyoming but it was too much long-distance work and hed had bad luck with his manager, a feller from Idaho with a pawnshop rodeo buckle, so hed looked up Rollo and offered to swap him a half-interest if hed run the place. That was back in 1978. The place had done real well. Course were not open now, she said, its winter and theres no tourists. Poor Rollo was helping Tick move the emus to another building when one of them turned on a dime and come right for him with its big razor claws. Emus is bad for claws.