Though Annie Proulx sets her fiction in isolated regions largely untainted by the modern world, she could hardly be accused of romanticizing them. Brutal and forbidding, the seaside Newfoundland village in The Shipping News, her richly accomplished Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, nevertheless provides solace and rebirth for a middle-aged man trying to stake out a new life for himself. But the characters in her piercing and darkly evocative collection, Close Range: Wyoming Stories, aren't nearly so fortunate. Whether ranch hands struggling through arid and punishing seasons or rodeo cowboys blazing around the circuit with broken bones and meager paydays, none can find refuge from an environment that offers nothing but hardship. Most never try. "All the travelin I ever done is goin around the coffeepot lookin for the handle," goes a typical lament, one of many home-spun phrases Proulx captures with knowing authenticity. Home is rarely a welcome retreat from the cruelties of the outside world, marked by splintered families, explosively violent outbursts, and frequent tragedy. In "The Half-Skinned Steer," the last selection chosen for John Updike's century-best short-story anthology, an aging New Englander heads west for his brother's funeral and finds Wyoming's blinding snowscapes waiting to consume him, as well. Few of Proulx's ill-fated ranchers choose to live there—the one who does made his decision by "stabbing a fork into a road map"—and fewer still have the opportunity to escape. The dull-witted, morbidly obese young heroine in "The Bunchgrass Edge Of The World" spends her evenings listening to cell-phone conversations on her scanner, jealous of the quarreling couples. Impatient for a suitor who may never arrive, she develops a peculiar relationship with an old John Deere tractor. While all 11 stories in Close Range are graced by Proulx's unflinching and often poetic prose, she saves her most emotionally affecting piece for last. "Brokeback Mountain" deals with a passionate but doomed affair between two rough-hewn cowboys who are unable to comprehend, much less pursue, their feelings for each other. Foremost a hard-bitten realist, Proulx harbors no illusions about how such a relationship will play out, and in light of the Matthew Shepard murder, her conclusion takes on a wrenchingly prescient resonance. Close Range risks succumbing to its own darkness, but as a Wyoming resident herself, Proulx invests her masterful stories with an earthy wit and aching, redeeming compassion.