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Close Range: Wyoming Stories |  |
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Close Range: Wyoming Stories | |
Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace.
These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent -- by an author writing at the peak of her craft.
作者简介 Annie Proulx has held NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships and residences at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Her first short story collection, Heart Songs and Other Stories, appeared in 1988, followed in 1992 by Postcards, which won the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The 1993 novel The Shipping News won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Accordion Crimes, Proulx's most recent novel, was published in June 1996.
She began working on the stories collected in Close Range in 1997. "The Half-Skinned Steer" was selected by Garrison Keillor for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 1998 and by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century. "Brokeback Mountain" won a 1998 O. Henry Short Story Award and a National Magazine Award through its publication in The New Yorker.
Annie Proulx lives in Wyoming, but spends much of the year traveling North America.
媒体推荐 From Kirkus Reviews
A vigorous second collection from Proulx (after Heart Songs and Other Stories, 1988): eleven nicely varied stories set in the roughhewn wasteland that one narrator calls a 97,000-square-miles dog's breakfast of outside exploiters, Republican ranchers and scenery.'' The characters here are windburned, fatalistic westerners stuck in the harsh lives they've made for themselves in this bitter demi-paradise. They include: hardworking, luckless ranchers (in the painfully concise ``Job History,'' and the sprawling ``Pair a Spurs,'' the latter a wry tale of divorce, sexual urgency, and sheer cussedness that bears fleeting resemblances to Proulx's Accordion Crimes); aging hellion Josanna Skiles (of ``A Lonely Coast'') and the lover who can neither tame her nor submit to her; a sagebrush Bluebeard and his inquisitive wife (in the amusingly fragmentary ``55 Miles to the Gas Pump''); and an itinerant rodeo cowboy (in ``The Mud Below'') whose vagrant spirit stubbornly kicks against memories of his disastrous childhood. Two stories are, effectively, miniature novels: ``People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water,'' about memorably dysfunctional feuding families; and ``The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,'' which begins as a collection of random eccentricities, then coheres into a grimly funny parody of the family saga. ``The Blood Bay'' retells a familiar western folktale, adding just a whiff of Chaucer's ``Pardoner's Tale.'' And two prizewinning pieces brilliantly display Proulx's trademark whipsaw wit and raw, lusty language. ``The Half-Skinned Steer'' wrests a rich portrayal of the experience of unbelonging from the account of an old man's journey westward, for his brother's funeral, back to the embattled home he'd spent decades escaping. And the powerful ``Brokeback Mountain'' explores with plangent understated compassion the lifelong sexual love between two cowboys destined for separation, and the harsh truth that ``if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.'' Gritty, authoritative stories of loving, losing, and bearing the consequences. Nobody else writes like this, and Proulx has never written better. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
The New York TimesPowerful...Read [the stories] for their absolute authenticity and their language, a wry poetry of loneliness and pain.
The Boston GlobeFew writers feel equally at home in the novel and the short story...[these stories] are tough as flint and on occasion breathtaking; together they stand with Proulx's best work.
PeopleAs she rips away our romantic notions of the West, Proulx asks how capable any of us are of outrunning our origins. Her fatalistic answer, in these stories, adds up to some breathtaking reading.
Outside magazineA major achievement in American fiction -- a gorgeous, deeply affecting adventure in stylistic plenitude, prose clarity, and hearts laid bare.
Richard EderThe New York Times Book ReviewGeography, 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.
Michael KnightThe Wall Street JournalMs. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms.
Carolyn SeeThe Washington Post Book WorldIt's 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.
Michael UpchurchThe Seattle Times Book ReviewHer characters -- stoical, hardheaded, yet willing to be ravaged by the closest available passion whenever the chance presents itself -- crackle and cavort on the page. Served up a full array of life's 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.
Jill VejnoskaAtlanta Journal-ConstitutionAnnie Proulx isn't 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 isn't easy, but Close Range is definitely worth it.
Anna MundowNew York Daily NewsClose 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.
Review
Richard Eder The New York Times Book Review 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.
编辑推荐 Amazon.com
With the very first sentence of the first story in this remarkable collection, Annie Proulx demonstrates what makes her great: images sharp as paper cuts conveyed in language so imaginative and compressed it's just this side of poetry; a sense of character so specific it takes only a sentence to establish a whole life; and the underlying promise of something utterly unexpected waiting just up ahead.
In 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."The Half-Skinned Steer" chronicles elderly Mero Corn's journey back to Wyoming for his brother's funeral. As he drives west, details of his eventful trip are interspersed with recollections of his youth on the ranch--most notably a tall tale he heard told long ago about a sad-sack rancher named Tin Head and a butchered steer. This is vintage Proulx, a combination of isolated landscapes, macabre events, and damaged people that adds up, in the end, to a near-perfect story. It's no surprise that "The Half-Skinned Steer" made it into John Updike's Best American Short Stories of the Century.
Proulx achieves similar results with many of the other stories in Close Range, including another prizewinner, "Brokeback Mountain," the bittersweet story of doomed love between two cowboys who "can't hardly be decent together," yet know "if we do that in the wrong place we'll be dead." But Proulx is careful to add some leavening to the mix. In "The Blood Bay" she indulges her taste for the gruesome with a morbidly amusing retelling of an Old West shaggy-dog story, while "Pair a Spurs" is the sad-funny rendering of divorce, Wyoming style. The author is a true original in every sense of the word, and her evocation of the West is as singular and surprising as that of Cormac McCarthy or Ivan Doig. Close Range is Proulx at her best. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Audiobook Review
Pulitzer Prize-winner E. Annie Proulx forays through the underside of America's beloved Wild West in Close Range, a collection of stories about hardship and more hardship in Wyoming territory. Understanding that the West's infinite spaces tended to inspire neither introspection nor contemplation, but a violent and insatiable restlessness, Proulx's eight stories are dark reflections on the lives of a handful of characters striving to define themselves against the unforgiving landscapes. The three professional actors chosen to read the text give strong, resounding interpretations of the macabre tales. (Running time: 6 hours, 4 cassettes) --Natasha Senjanovich --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
专业书评 From Library Journal
This marvelous collection proves that Proulx's Pulitzer Prize for The Shipping News was no one-shot deal. Set in Wyoming, the 11 stories "feature down-on-their-luck ranchers, cowboys, and working men who watch helplessly as the modern world leaves them behind." (LJ 5/1/99)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The New York Times Book Review, Richard Eder
This is splendid material, set out with pain and compassion but above all with a shrewdness of observation... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The Times, London, Peter Kemp
With her second set of stories, Close Range, Proulx trains her gaze on the state where she now lives: Wyoming. The results are magnificent, but unlikely to elate the region's tourist board. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The Wall Street Journal, Michael Knight
Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms. Her people not only "stand" the bad luck and heartbreak that comes their way; they stare it down with astonishing strength, and sometimes they manage to triumph. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Why should you read these stories, then, if their characters' lives are so mean and their fates so inevitable? You read them for their absolute authenticity, the sense they convey that you are beyond fact or fiction in a world that could not be any other way. And you read them for their language, not lyrical but a wry poetry of loneliness and pain. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From AudioFile
Annie Proulx shapes a story like Andrew Wyeth paints a picture: simple, clear, realistic, and stunning in its revelation. And William Dufris brings Proulx's stories to the ear with the same elegant ease, layering fine washes of tonal inflection over strong individuals and the unyielding landscape of Wyoming. Dufris misses none of the stories' flatness or emotionality, lending dignity and insight to dysfunction, love, and desperation. The relentless battering of the wind, the mysterious allure of a pair of spurs, the shame of forbidden lust come together in sometimes breathtaking blends of sound and silence. Unfortunately, the audiobook's editors have crowded the stories together, shattering the listener's sense of closure after each one. Still, Dufris's performance places Proulx's characters strongly within a sense of place. R.P.L. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
