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Close Range
Wyoming Stories
359 pages
A visceral, unflinching portrait of the modern American West where the landscape is as brutal as the heartbreaks it contains.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like stepping into a biting winter wind, bracing, harsh, and undeniably magnificent. The prose is muscular and densely textured, packed with visceral imagery that brings the stark Wyoming landscape to vivid life. There is a steady, deliberate pace to these stories, allowing the weight of rural isolation and thwarted desires to settle deep into your bones. The tone is unsentimental and often darkly comic, yet it gives way to moments of profound, devastating vulnerability. It is a mood of rugged melancholy, where the environment shapes and breaks the people who inhabit it. This is a book for readers who crave uncompromising literary fiction and sentences that feel carved directly from the unforgiving earth.
- Mood
- stark
- desolate
- rugged
- melancholic
- Tone
- unsentimental
- gritty
- darkly comic
- observant
- bleak
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- rural isolation · thwarted desire · the myth of the American West · economic hardship · inescapable landscapes
- The writing
- Muscular, idiosyncratic, and densely textured, packed with visceral imagery and regional vernacular.
- The arc
- Moves from harsh, darkly comic struggles for survival to moments of profound, often tragic, vulnerability.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate uncompromising literary fiction, rugged landscapes, and sentences that feel carved from stone.
Content notes
- homophobia
- animal cruelty
- sexual violence
- domestic abuse
- graphic violence
About the book
From the and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short-story collections of our time. 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.
Description from Open Library.
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