The Half-Skinned Steer | The Landscape of Fiction
In the following review, the author praises Proulx for her ‘‘complex plotting’’ and interweaving of the ‘‘two tales’’ in ‘‘The Half-Skinned Steer.’’
I discovered Annie Proulx’s latest collection of short stories on the list of contenders for The New Yorker Book Award for best fiction of 1999. I resolved to read it because years ago I had purchased her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Shipping News, and (need I say this?) I had never gotten around to reading it. The stories in Close Range grabbed me ‘‘like a claw in the gut,’’ a simile I borrow from one of the stories: ‘‘This wild country— indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of...
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