Fine Just the Way it is

The fantastic new collection of stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Shipping News' and 'Brokeback Mountain'. 'Fine Just The Way It Is' marks Annie Proulx's return to the Wyoming of 'Brokeback Mountain' and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. The stories are cast over centuries, and capture the voices and lives of the settlers this sagebrushed and weatherworn country has known, from the native Indian tribes to the modern day ranch owners and politicians, and their cowboy forebears. In 'A Family Man', an old man nearing the end of his life unburdens himself of the weighty family secrets that were his father's unwelcome legacy. 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' follows Archie and Rosie, a young pioneer couple, and their hardships in their attempt to homestead in the exposed wintry expanses of the prairie, and 'Testimony of the Donkey' finds a young international couple, Marc and Caitlin, struggling with much more modern concerns, and confronting uncertainty as their relationship comes to its end. These are stories of desperation and hard times, often marked by an inescapable sadness, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes -- confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty -- with the more benign values of the new west. These are bold, elegant and memorable pieces, and once more confirm Annie Proulx as one of the most talented, unique short story writers in the language.

'Proulx is at her urgent, muscular best when elbow deep in the romance of hard souls and bittersweet lives. As a portraitist of the fearsome, awesome Wyoming landscape she is peerless. To read her descriptions of the West is to fall hopelessly and inescapable in love.' Melanie McGrath, Evening Standard 'A sublimely good writer about landscape and the relationship of man to landscape!Proulx's brilliance is to hedge her hard comedy with tremendous tenderness ...These are meticulous, wonderfully actualised descriptions of small lives lived in a place that is lonely and unchanging, and heartbreakingly beautiful, and that is trying to kill you.' Sam Leith, Daily Telegraph 'Like "Brokeback Mountain", it scrutinises and salutes the near-mute stoicism of people trapped in implacably adverse circumstances. And on the subject Proulx is incomparable.' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times 'Compressed, evocative prose conveys the sharp details of hard times in an unforgiving landscape.' Financial Times 'This volume finely exhibits Proulx's distinctive skills' Sunday Times 'Despite their shared backdrop, these tales span cultures and centuries, depicting characters as diverse as a couple of young homesteaders trying to muddle through a harsh 18th century winter, and a woman raised by a '"trash rancher" returning home from Iraq. Nine in all, they vary exhilaratingly in pace, tone and length- in everything that is, but accomplishment.' Daily Mail 'In Proulx's Wyoming, your past is never over, and you are very unlikely to die anywhere so peaceful as a bed. This is relentless, barren and possible malevolent country, and the real achievement of Fine Just the Way It Is is to transmit characters' strong sense of the conspiracy of their environment!Infused with myth, shorn of sentimentality, yet never less than generous, these stories start from the principle that, in fact, things are almost never fine the way they are; but that there is probably nothing that can be done about it.' Independent '!warm, witty and tender. If more people could write short stories like this, the novel would indeed be in serious trouble.' Irvine Welsh, FT 'A writer whose main character is the land rather than its people, Proulx's vision is every bit as flinty and treacherous as its bedrock. She is not a recorder for this dangersou state, but its avenging angel.' Rosemary Goring, Glasgow Herald 'The cast of characters is rich and poignant!a moving collection, by turns mythic and contemporary!' The Times 'Proulx is an enchanting, unusual, intense novelist!' Philip Hensher, The Spectator 'There is no happiness,' Proulx writes, 'like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.' Few American writers are as good as evoking that idea as she is, and hardly any can watch it all unspool with quite her sense of timing.' Tim Adams, Observer 'In a perfect demonstration of how small stories can bloom into universal themes reminding us of our humanity and how fragile it is, Proulx has once again done the art of writing proud. I can't imagine a more profound, and extraordinarily written, collection of stories this year.' Scotsman

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