Close Range: Wyoming Stories

Eleven stories set against Wyoming’s vast, indifferent landscape. Ranch hands, rodeo riders, aging cowboys, and people clinging to ways of life that the modern world has left behind. This is the collection that contains “Brokeback Mountain,” but every story here is worth the read.

Why Consider This

If you prefer short fiction, or if you want to see Proulx at her fiercest, Close Range is where to begin. The stories are compressed, intense, and often brutal. Proulx writes about the West without romance, showing the loneliness and quick violence that come with living in a place where the nearest neighbor is an hour’s drive away.

“Brokeback Mountain” is the most famous piece here, a love story between two cowboys that is devastating in its restraint. But “The Mud Below” follows a rodeo rider’s obsession with a clarity that makes you flinch. “The Half-Skinned Steer” opens with an old man driving west to his brother’s funeral and becomes something much stranger. Each story works like a small, precise engine.

What to Expect

Spare, muscular prose. Characters who speak in dialect and say less than they feel. Stories that end abruptly because Proulx trusts the reader to carry the weight of what has been left unsaid. Winner of the National Magazine Award for Fiction.