From the Pulitzer Prize–winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short story collections of our time. Annie Proulxs masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In The Mud Below, a rodeo riders obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In The Half-Skinned Steer, an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brothers funeral, and dies a mile from home. In Brokeback Mountain, the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the worlds violent intolerance. These are stories of desperation, hard times, and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyomings traditional character and attitudes—confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty—with the more benign values of the new west. Stories in Close Range have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

Proulx, Annie