Wyoming Stories series by Annie Proulx (#01~03)
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Overview: Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honours include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story ‘Brokeback Mountain’, which originally appeared in the New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. She lives in Seattle.
Genre: Contemporary Fiction | Short Story | Western
A collection of short stories inspired by the harsh and unforgiving landscape of Wyoming. Throughout, Annie Proulx invests these stories with an intelligence and black humour that transforms them into something new and surprising. In one story, a slight young man defies his mother’s insults to become a rodeo star, while in another, an octogenarian finds himself drawn back to the ranch that he quite decades before — against his better judgement. Elsewhere, Proulx demonstrates her taste for the macabre in a grisly tale of bad weather, gambling and amputation set a hundred years ago. Inventive, compassionate and wildly funny, these marvellous stories explore the unbreakable bond between a people and their land.
1. Close Range (Brokeback Mountain and other stories)
The inspiration behind ‘Life of Pi’ director Ang Lee’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is one of the short stories to be found in this haunting collection of Wyoming tales.
—‘Brokeback Mountain’ is set in the beautiful, wild landscape of Wyoming where cowboys live as they have done for generations. Hard, lonely lives in unforgiving country. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are two ranch hands, glad to have found each other’s company where none had been expected. But companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain, something not looked for – an intimacy neither can forget.
—‘Brokeback Mountain’ was made into an Academy Award-winning film by Ang Lee, and starred Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway.
2. Bad Dirt
The stories in Annie Proulx’s new collection are peopled by characters who struggle with circumstances beyond their control in a kind of rural noir half-light. Trouble comes at them from unexpected angles, and they will themselves through it, hardheaded and resourceful. Bound by the land and by custom, they inhabit worlds that are often isolated, dangerous, and in Proulx’s prose, vivid." In "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?" rancher Gilbert Wolfscale, alienated from his sons, bewildered by his criminal ex-wife, gets shoved down his throat the fact that the old-style ranch life has gone. Several stories concern the eccentric denizens of Elk Tooth, a tiny hamlet where life revolves around three bars. Elk Toothers enter beard-growing contests, scrape together a living hauling hay, catch poachers in unorthodox ways. "Man Crawling Out of Trees" is about urban newcomers from the east and their discovery, too late, that one of them has violated the deepest ethics of the place. Above all, these stories are about the lives of rapidly disappearing rural Americans.
3. Fine Just The Way It Is
‘Fine Just The Way It Is’ marks Annie Proulx’s return to the Wyoming of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. The stories are cast over centuries, and capture the voices and lives of the settlers this sage-brushed and weather-worn country has known, from the native Indian tribes to the modern day ranch owners and politicians, and their cowboy forebears.
In ‘A Family Man’, an old man nearing the end of his life unburdens himself of the weighty family secrets that were his father’s unwelcome legacy. ‘Them Old Cowboy Songs’ follows Archie and Rosie, a young pioneer couple, and their hardships in their attempt to homestead in the exposed wintry expanses of the prairie, and ‘Testimony of the Donkey’ finds a young international couple, Marc and Caitlin, struggling with much more modern concerns, and confronting uncertainty as their relationship comes to its end.
These are stories of desperation and hard times, often marked by an inescapable sadness, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming’s traditional character and attitudes – confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty – with the more benign values of the new west. These are bold, elegant and memorable pieces, and once more confirm Annie Proulx as one of the most talented, unique short story writers in the language.
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