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    Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2
    Unavailable
    Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2
    Unavailable
    Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2
    Ebook247 pages3 hours

    Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2

    By Annie Proulx

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx follows the success of Close Range with another remarkable collection of short stories set in Wyoming.

    Bad Dirt is filled with the vivid and willful characters for which Proulx has become known. Each occupies a community or landscape described in rich and robust language, with an eye for detail unparalleled in American fiction.

    In ‘The Contest’, the men of Elk Tooth, Wyoming, vow to put aside their razors for two seasons and wait to see who has the longest beard come the 4th of July. Deb Sipple, the moving protagonist of ‘That Trickle Down Effect’, finds that his opportunism – and his smoking habit – lead to a massive destruction. And ‘What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?’ is the story of Gilbert Wolfscale, whose rabid devotion to his ranch drives off his wife and sons.

    Proulx displays her wit in every story of this stunning collection, as well as her knowledge of the West, of history, of ranching and farming. Her profound sympathy for characters who must use sheer will and courage to make it in tough territory makes this collection extraordinarily compelling.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateOct 21, 2010
    ISBN9780007290130
    Unavailable
    Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2
    Author

    Annie Proulx

    Annie Proulx is the author of nine books, including the novel The Shipping News, Barkskins and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. She lives in New Hampshire.

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    Reviews for Bad Dirt

    4/5

    223 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Dark, funny gems, every one. These reminded me of Keilor's Lake Wobegon tales, but with a significantly sharper edge. The weirdness also goes that step beyond, bordering sometimes on delicious surreality. Fabulous stuff, as I've come to expect from Proulx.
    • 3/5
      Her forays into magical realism largely ruined this collection. While the grandeur of the landscape is ever present, it's apparent that when focused, the land and people are hopelessly bleak in a delightfully honest manner. Appreciated main characters in one story popping up with minor roles in another. My favorite was Man Crawling Out of Trees where a recently retired New Yorker refuses to leave her house to assist a skier who has broken his leg and crawled his agonizing way to her front door because she fears it might be a malicious trick, her husband and townsfolk are disgusted. Also enjoyed the Wamsutter Wolf and Florida Rental (3/11).
    • 4/5
      I didn't realize this was vol 2 when I began listening on Hoopla. There is also a vol 3.I enjoyed these stories, especially The Trickle Down Effect (man hauls alfalfa from Wisconsin with breaks for drinking only); Man Crawling Out of Trees (easterners retire to WY and break the #1 rule: help others); and The Wamsutter Wolf (man rents a trailer park in the desert, only to find the high school bully and the needy girl married and living nearby). But they were all good. I wish I had read them on paper rather than listened--the worst part is not having a table of contents to refer to!Several stories take place in the town of Elk Tooth, WY, so there are recurring characters.
    • 3/5
      This is the third collection of Proulx's Wyoming stories I've read and while there are some real gems in here there aren't enough to warrant more stars. Like "Fine Just the Way It Is" Proulx uses a series of yarns about Elk Tooth, Wyoming to connect this collection though the yarns in this one are much better than her attempt to get into the mind of the devil in "Fine Just the Way It Is. "The Wamsutter Wolf" is about as close as Proulx gets to a real horror story, imagine being trapped in a trailer park with a disgusting woman from high school and her sticky children, "Man Crawling out of Trees" and "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?" are Proulx at her strongest and provide that sweeping beautiful landscape she details so vividly in her writing. As someone else mentioned below, Proulx is a great writer but you can't knock em all out of the park all the time.
    • 3/5
      Proulx is a born storyteller, and Wyoming is her home, or one of them. She knows it well and cen tell a story or two about the rough, but wonderful country and its people.
    • 3/5
      Bad Dirt is the second volume of Wyoming Stories. For me it did not reach the same heights as Close Range. In Bad Dirt there are more departures from realism and more use of the folksy yarn, less of the sharp love for the land, less capturing of character. Three stories stand out for me, each focusing on a different demographic. 'What kind of furniture would Jesus pick?' tells of a rancher gradually ground down and reduced to disarray, along with the whole state of Wyoming. 'Man crawling out of trees' describes the experience of a middle class couple from the East, and their growing unhappiness, set against the sometimes fairylike beauty of their surroundings. The 'Wamsutter wolf' deals with trailer trash.
    • 4/5
      I'm generally not a lover of short stories (hence this has sat on my TBR for ages), but wow - this collection was just fantastic. This is the second collection of Proulx's Wyoming stories (I'll now have to buy the first), with each story a vignette on life in rural Wyoming. Some of the characters vaguely interconnect along the way, but each vignette sits independently.Many of the stories are darkly humorous with a sprinkle of craziness here and there, and throughout the writing is just sublime. I've not enjoyed a book of short stories as much since F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', and the impressive imagination at work in this collection put me in mind of Fitzgerald's superb skill at short story writing, albeit with more of a backwoods feel.It's been too long since I read something by Annie Proulx - I'll be moving her further up the groaning wish list.4 stars - everything a collection of short stories should be: fun, slightly bonkers and a joy to read.
    • 3/5
      Annie Proulx writes so sharply that she defines her characters with what feels like a razor's edge.

      This isn't a collection of happy stories about a West that never existed; it's a collection of taut essays about a hardscrabble life. Excellent writing, if not always the easiest stuff to read.
    • 3/5
      You know what this reminded me of? The stories of Herman Charles Bosman. He wrote about life in small outposts in the South African veld in the 1930s. There's the same dry humour - the beard-growing competition is a good example - but there's also the same stories of isolation and drought and small-town feuding.
    • 5/5
      It’s a combination of realistic stories and tall tales set in and about Wyoming. The characters live around Elk Tooth, and most of them are 'broke, proud, ingenious, and setting heels against civilized society's pull.”(p.179) They are very well drawn, and introduced in much detail and over many pages, as if in a novel. Some of them are the main characters of one story and then re-appear in for a mention in another. In many of the stories, the plot unfolds over a few paragraphs after a lengthy background, and then the climax follows. Usually, there is no conclusion.The story Man Crawling Out of Trees is slightly different, and features a couple from New York City who have come to Wyoming, like many other comfortably well-off upper-middleclass people, to retire. They are the ones who pay most attention to the beauty of the landscape, and this short story abounds with beautiful descriptions of the prairies and the mountains. Their life there presents its own adaptation challenges though.“The house stood on a sunny slope of wildflowers and silver sage with the view of the Bachelor range, which even in summer resembled a monstrous slab of halvah veined with mauve chocolate. In the distance the Wind Rivers lay against the horizon like crumpled envelopes.At dusk a globe of light like an incandescent jellyfish formed above Swift Fox and stained the mountainy darkness like the weak orange of civilization. (p 108)“..Mitchell was stunned by the beauty of the place, not the overphotographed jags of the Grand Tetons but the high prairie and the luminous yellow distance, which pleased his sense of spatial arrangement. He felt as though he had stumbled into the landscape never before seen on the earth and at the same time that he had been transported to the ur-landscape before human beginnings. The mountains crouched at every horizon like dark sleeping animals, their backs whitened by snow. He trod on wildflowers, glistening quartz crystals, on agate and jade, brilliant lichens. The unfamiliar grasses vibrated with light, their incandescent stalks lighting the huge ground. Distance reduced a herd of cattle to a handful of tossed cloves.” p.106She's got an eye- no doubt. Those descriptions are the closest to what I experienced when being there.I really enjoyed the collection, even though it took me some time to get into it, mainly because of the idiosyncrasies of the language. It’s the characters who linger. Annie Proulx seems to have a very keen eye observing them. It’s good that she is chronicling the life there, because the picture may disappear soon.
    • 4/5
      Annie Proulx's stories are about people whose lives aren't quite under control through no fault of their own. The bittersweet in life, mixed with the all to human foibles of her characters can add up to some painfully amusing stories. Her turn of phrase and her choice of scenes is spot on.
    • 4/5
      Great writing, even if I can hardly stand to read collections of short stories.
    • 5/5
      Annie Proulx is a very good writer. The plots and characters in these short stories seem like nothing but real and true and inevitable-- as if you're reading about them in a newspaper.