Close Range: Wyoming Stories is a 1999 collection of short fictioin by Annie Proulx,[1] beginning in 1997. The stories are set in the desolate landscape of rural Wyoming and detail the often grim lives of the protagonists.
The best known story from the collection is "Brokeback Mountain", which was previously published as a 64-page novella in 1998. The story was the basis for Ang Lee's 2005 film, Brokeback Mountain.
“The Half-Skinned Steer” was selected by novelist John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999).[2]
Observing that “Proulx doesn't use language; she goads it,” Irish Times literary critic Eileen Battersby ranks the collection as a whole less impressive than Proulx’s first volume, Heart Songs (1988). Battersby reserves special praise for “Brokeback Mountain,” calling it a “masterpiece.”[3]
“The elements of unreality, the fantastic and improbable, color all of these stories as they color real life. In Wyoming not the least fantastic situation is the determination to make a living ranching in this tough and unforgiving place.”—Annie Proulx on Close Range: Wyoming Stories.[4]
Julie Scanlon, writing in the Journal of Narrative Theory, comments on the limits of Proulx’s literary realism:
It would be over-generalizing to state that Proulx’s style is unequivocally realist…Proulx’s fictions can shift into magical realism on occasion. For example, stories in Close Range contain talking tractors and a seemingly magical pair of spurs, which are presented without a blink of recognition that they are fantastical. (“The Bunchgrass Edge of the World” and “Pair a Spurs”)[5]
↑ Scanlon, 2008 p. 94: Ellipsis inserted for brevity, meaning unaltered, reads: “...and not only because the very definition of realism as a formal style is equivocal.”
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
