This is such a beautifully written book. The prose is so well crafted and polished until it shines. Annie Proulx's subtle mixture of the character's voice and local dialect and slang with her own elegiacal descriptions is a great example of free indirect style. She is amazing at describing landscapes and summing up people in a few sentences and she's good at the subtlety of smell (all these cattle ranchers pong). My favourite stories were Brokeback Mountain - but you kind of imagine the story with the actors, having seen the movie a few times - and also The Mud Below - which was about a rodeo rider, and I imagine they also used bits of in the film. The rest of the stories are consistently good too.