Author: Annie Proulx
Translator: Dong-seop Cho
Publisher: Media2.0
366 pages
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean only. |
About This Book
A vigorous second collection from Proulx (after Heart Songs and Other Stories,
1988): eleven nicely varied stories set in the roughhewn wasteland that one
narrator calls a 97,000-square-miles dog's breakfast of outside exploiters,
Republican ranchers and scenery." The characters here are windburned, fatalistic
westerners stuck in the harsh lives they've made for themselves in this bitter
demi-paradise. They include: hardworking, luckless ranchers (in the painfully
concise "Job History," and the sprawling "Pair a Spurs," the latter a wry tale
of divorce, sexual urgency, and sheer cussedness that bears fleeting
resemblances to Proulx's Accordion Crimes); aging hellion Josanna Skiles (of "A
Lonely Coast") and the lover who can neither tame her nor submit to her; a
sagebrush Bluebeard and his inquisitive wife (in the amusingly fragmentary "55
Miles to the Gas Pump"); and an itinerant rodeo cowboy (in "The Mud Below")
whose vagrant spirit stubbornly kicks against memories of his disastrous
childhood. Two stories are, effectively, miniature novels: "People in Hell Just
Want a Drink of Water," about memorably dysfunctional feuding families; and "The
Bunchgrass Edge of the World," which begins as a collection of random
eccentricities, then coheres into a grimly funny parody of the family saga. "The
Blood Bay" retells a familiar western folktale, adding just a whiff of Chaucer's
"Pardoner's Tale." And two prizewinning pieces brilliantly display Proulx's
trademark whipsaw wit and raw, lusty language. "The Half-Skinned Steer" wrests a
rich portrayal of the experience of unbelonging from the account of an old man's
journey westward, for his brother's funeral, back to the embattled home he'd
spent decades escaping. And the powerful "Brokeback Mountain" explores with
plangent understated compassion the lifelong sexual love between two cowboys
destined for separation, and the harsh truth that "if you can't fix it you've
got to stand it." Gritty, authoritative stories of loving, losing, and bearing
the consequences. Nobody else writes like this, and Proulx has never written
better.
About Brokeback
Mountain
Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and
brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and
reviewers, "Brokeback Mountain" is her masterpiece.
Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're
working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree
line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable,
but something deeper catches them that summer.
Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But
over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes
the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to
preserve it.
The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication
of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The
O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult,
dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's
violent intolerance.
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