New and Selected Stories - Annie Proulx

From one of the greatest story writers of our time, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, two O. Henry Prizes, and the celebrated author of Brokeback Mountain, comes a collection that includes three new stories and the most iconic stories of Annie Proulx's stunning, decades-long career. nAnnie 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.

n nThese 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.n