New and Selected Stories

Annie Proulx’s “gritty and gleaming stories” (New York Times Book Review) are about loneliness, violence, desperation, and the wrong kinds of love. In “The Mud Below,” a rodeo rider’s 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 range he grew up on for his brother’s funeral and dies a mile from home. In the masterpiece, “Brokeback Mountain,” the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world’s intolerance.

These are stories of hard times, and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk talks, 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.