In the following review, Moore 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 sky—provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut" ("People...