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 Proulxs stunning, decades-long career.
Annie Proulxs 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 riders 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 brothers funeral and dies a mile from home. In the masterpiece, Brokeback Mountain, the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the worlds 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 Wyomings traditional character and attitudesconfrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficultywith the more benign values of the new west.
