Deze serie duikt in de ruige schoonheid van het Amerikaanse Westen, specifiek in het hart van Wyoming. De verhalen vangen de levens van individuen die worstelen met eenzaamheid, snelle gewelddadigheden en vaak gecompliceerde relaties. De auteur portretteert meesterlijk de complexiteit van de menselijke geest te midden van een landschap dat zowel meedogenloos als magnifiek is. Dit zijn boeiende verhalen over wanhoop, moeilijke tijden en onverwachte vreugde.
Short-story collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes . Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the 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.
"The stories in Annie Proulx's new collection are peopled by characters who struggle with circumstances beyond their control in a kind of rural noir half-light. Trouble comes at them from unexpected angles, and they will themselves through it, hardheaded and resourceful. Bound by the land and by custom, they inhabit worlds that are often isolated, dangerous, and in Proulx's prose, vivid." In "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?" rancher Gilbert Wolfscale, alienated from his sons, bewildered by his criminal ex-wife, gets shoved down his throat the fact that the old-style ranch life has gone. Several stories concern the eccentric denizens of Elk Tooth, a tiny hamlet where life revolves around three bars. Elk Toothers enter beard-growing contests, scrape together a living hauling hay, catch poachers in unorthodox ways. "Man Crawling Out of Trees" is about urban newcomers from the east and their discovery, too late, that one of them has violated the deepest ethics of the place. Above all, these stories are about the lives of rapidly disappearing rural Americans.
The friendship between Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two cowboys, evolves into an intimate relationship while they are working together as a herder and camp tender, sharing a bond that spans many years and frequent separations.
