Annie Proulx is one of my favorites. She may be best known for “Brokeback Mountain” and “Shipping News” but, IMO, so many of her books/stories are even better. I love all of her work but I just finished the third volume of her Wyoming stories, “Fine Just the Way It Is.” Her writing just blows me away. It’s her writing about the wind in Wyoming that makes me think she’s caught the brutal essence of what it’s like for those who live in that state. Her prose is often breathtaking. Here’s an example, “She realized that every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost them early and late, 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. This was the waiting darkness that surrounded ranch boys, the dangerous growing up that canceled their favored status. The trip along this road was a toll call of grief. Wind began to lift the fine dust and the sun set in haze.” “When she got out at the house the wind swallowed her whole, snatching at her scarf, huffing up under the hem of her coat, eeling up her sleeve. She could feel the grit.”