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AudibleInk - Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3
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List Price: $25.00
Our Price: $16.50
Your Save: $ 8.50 ( 34% )
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Manufacturer: Scribner
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FREE SHIPPING on Orders over $25!
Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781416571667
ISBN: 1416571663
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: 2008-09-09
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner
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Editorial Reviews:
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Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain" (in her first volume of Wyoming Stories) and Bad Dirt (her second), National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral new collection. In Fine Just the Way It Is, she has expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate. "Every ranch...had lost a boy," thinks Dakotah Hicks as she drives through "the hammered red landscape" of Wyoming, "boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and 'unloaded' guns. Her boy, too...The trip along this road was a roll call of grief." Proulx's characters try to climb out of poverty and desperation but get cut down as if the land itself wanted their blood. Deeply sympathetic to the men and women fighting to survive in this harsh place, Proulx turns their lives into fiction with the power of myth -- and leaves the reader in awe. The winner of two O. Henry Prizes, Annie Proulx has been anthologized in nearly every major collection of great American stories. Her bold, inimitable language, her exhilarating eye for detail and her dark sense of humor make this a profoundly compelling collection.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Too Harsh For Me
Comment: Dear Folks,
I have read all of Annie Proulx's books and it seems that this set of stories was just to grim for my taste. I love her writing, compostion of prose and word use. Usually I read with a dictionary close at hand. Perhaps I am just a whimp, but once in a while it would be nice to read one her stories and find what I would term a "happy" ending. I must be getting old and grumpy. I realize that she is writing about the old West and that is the way things happened, but my stomach just wasn't in it this time around.
Customer Rating:
Summary: proofreading
Comment: I really love reading books by Annie Proulx. The words she uses and the structure of her sentences are so wonderful that, unlike most books, I actually read every word, apparently, unlike her editor. In the first paragraph, page 8 of Family Man we find RAY Forkenbrock "squinting against the slanting ice" - nice sentence. However, in the last paragraph of the same page I guess either Annie has decided to use the nickname ROY for RAY or someone didn't bother proofreading the segment. Nitpicking for sure, but when a book costs $25.00 you'd think some kind of care might be taken in getting the words right.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wyoming is Better than Hell
Comment: Annie Proulx's latest collection of stories from Wyoming, Fine Just The Way It Is, also includes two bits about Hell; Wyoming may be better than Hell, but just barely, and only because it is so much less populated. Hell, together with Satan and his sidekick Duane Fork, provide most of the humor in this collection. The other stories are heavy in misery but not overweight. Proulx has a perfect touch with the miserable truth about things: her skill with stories is that she is neither condescending towards her characters nor overdone for her readers. The pitch in all the stories is just about perfect, although the one piece set back in the time of a Native American buffalo hunt was steeped in bathos and pathos, as well as blood and tears.
The loveliest story in the collection, with its own rhythm, underlining harmony, and a final succinct coda is "Them Old Cowboy Songs". "Tits Up in A Ditch" is such pure misery I hate to say I liked it but I did. "Testimony of the Donkey" was well-laid and carefully built up and quietly moving, as if it were a real story told by someone to me at the kitchen table, Shipping News sugar and cream laden tea between us, and with a big question left at the end: illusion or reality?
Speaking of Shipping News, and I always do when I talk about Annie Proulx, it is one of the best novels I've ever read. These short stories keep my admiration for her fully stoked.
For more reviews check out[...]
Customer Rating:
Summary: End of the affair . . .
Comment: This book is a mishmash of different story styles, and not all of them as successful as the author's trademark accounts of life in the American West (past and present). There are three good examples of that genre here, and they surely must mark the end of her affair with Wyoming. Her usual grimly comic vision, still harboring a bit of romance for far-flung places and people living on the margins, has gone "tits up in a ditch" in this third collection of her western stories.
What might have been tragic ironies that resonate in the heart, as we find them in "Brokeback Mountain," have now evolved into outright despair. Moments of joy are so fleeting they barely have a chance to live and breathe before they die in the face of bad luck and life's cruelties. It would be hard to find anywhere a portrayal of life on the frontier (then and now) that attempts more openly to reduce the myth of pioneer spirit to a living nightmare. Reading this book I was reminded of the Richard Avedon photos of the people of the West, beaten down and ravaged, barely hanging on to their dignity. This is an American West rarely found in fiction since Dorothy Scarborough's "The Wind." Not recommended for anybody whose heroes have always been cowboys.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Proulx great as usual
Comment: As usual Annie Proulx tells it like it is. I'm always looking forward to her story endings. Good reading.
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