Author: Annie Proulx
Genre: Fiction - Short stories
Audience: Adult
Format: Book - lent by a friend
From Goodreads: 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 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.
What I thought: OK so really? A book about Wyoming? Cowboys and such? Hmmm, ok, I'll give it a go. Oh my goodness, riveting! I have been in such a reading slump recently with so so books I'd forgotten how amazing a truly good book can be.
Annie Proulx writing is so polished it gleans, but it isn't pretentious. You don't feel like you are reading high literature by an author who is desperate to show you how vast her word bank is. It is effortless, provides crystal clear images of what the character is seeing and feeling at the time. So beautiful it flows and the only re-reading you have to do is because a passage is so perfectly written you have to experience it again.
He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.The collection does include Brokeback Mountain which of course was made into a movie and for me is the pick of the stories, although they are all able to hold their own. Annie Proulx is being added to my list of authors I want to read.
DON'T FORGET TO COMMENT IN ORDER TO WIN AN EBOOK COPY OF CONNIE CORCORAN WILSON'S HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION II!
