In the late 1990s, it seems nearly impossible to lead a romantic life. The terrain is clearly laid out in city blocks, well-demarcated freeways, and cubicles distinguished only by the variance of screensavers and desktop wallpapers. Sales of sport-utility vehicles have far exceeded any rational reckoning, but the toughest obstacles these trucks tackle are the speed bumps at the mall parking lot. The mud on your neighbor's Eddie Bauer boots was hard won in a scuffle over the last bonsai at the Home Depot nursery; children grow up dreaming of being the next Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, or Martha Stewart. No one wants to be a cowboy anymore.

But just as the last Marlboro Man billboards are dismantled and overlaid with Surgeon General-approved tips on how to lead a healthy, safe lifestyle, "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" arrives to keep the campfire burning. In this collection of 11 short stories, Annie Proulx creates a contemporary relevance for the sons and daughters of the Western plains. With harsh, elegant prose, she lays bare the lives of ranch hands, rodeo cowboys, and sheepherders, carving raw, painfully human portraits of a people most often reduced to romanticized caricatures silhouetted against a setting sun.

There's not a whole lot of open plain left in America at the end of the 20th century, and the characters inhabiting Proulx's landscape are viewed by the encroaching outside world as anachronisms and nuisances. In the opening story, "The Half-Skinned Steer," failed cattle rancher Mero Corn finds himself on a road he'd never anticipated. Winding up "sixty years later as an octogenarian vegetarian widower pumping an Exercycle in the middle of a colonial house in Woolfoot, Massachusetts," Mero is jarred out of his anesthetized life by a phone call from the daughter-in-law of Rollo, the brother he'd left behind decades before. After losing too many cattle to the rough terrain, Rollo had sold the ranch, Ten Sleep, to an Australian businessman bent on starting an Australian/Western-themed tourist trap. Hired to run the ranch in exchange for a half-interest in the business, Rollo met an unlikely end: After a lifetime of running cattle and fending off marauding lions, he was laid open "belly to breakfast" by an emu he was moving between barns. Summoned back to this half-forgotten life, Mero begins a stuporous four-day journey by Cadillac, winding through reveries of a long-ago evening spent with his Everclear-soaked father and his horsy, tall-tale-spinning girlfriend. While his recollection of this conversation juts through, sharp and lucid, the rest of his memories of that life are so thickly scarred over with time and distance, he forgets where to turn off for the ranch's entrance. In a cruel twist of fate, his life is claimed by the ravages of the land he spent a lifetime trying to escape.

Damned to a life of ranch servitude, saddled by her oversized physique, and lacking the audacity possessed by the sister and brother who had bolted to the lights of Las Vegas, "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World"'s barrel-bodied heroine, Ottaline Touhey, dreams of escape. Seen as the family disgrace, and verbally humiliated on a daily basis by her war-soured father, Aladdin, "She wanted to be away, wearing red sandals with cork soles, sitting in the passenger seat of a pearl-colored late-model pickup, drinking from a bottle shaped like a hula girl. When would someone come for her?" With nothing to do once the day's work is finished but all the staring into the distance that can be done in a lifetime, Ottaline's despair grows so large that it takes on a voice of its own. But as she carries on conversations with the wrecked John Deere 4030 in the ranch's gravel quarry, she eventually reaps the rewards of patience. As her 96-year-old grandfather has learned, "The main thing in life was staying power. That was it: stand around long enough you'd get to sit down."

While periodically leavened with a rough sort of comic relief borne of tall-tales and gallows-tinged yarns, the collection ends on a deeply bittersweet and visceral note with the stunning "Brokeback Mountain." This 1998 National Magazine Award winner is the moving tale of two cowboys who discover perfect, impossible, and ultimately destructive passion borne out of lonely nights working as herders on Brokeback Mountain. While the two never mention the physicality of their relationship, save for one, "I'm not no queer," volleyed back quickly with, "Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody's business but ours," the coupling of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist that summer is neither insignificant nor fleeting for either of them. When, four years later, Jack comes to visit Ennis and his wife and children, it proves painfully evident to both that their attraction had not been merely endemic of their isolation.

"A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind them. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard...." In the end, each man pays an unfathomable price for this impossible and inescapable love. As Ennis learns, "If you can't fix it you've got to stand it."

Proulx's characters are subject to the cruelty of the terrain in a way that is seemingly irreconcilable with the leisure and convenience-oriented society of late 20th-century America. But as long as there is land to roam and tend, the men and women of the Wyoming territory will carve out their livings from it. While it may not be the most comfortable life, it's what they've always done, and some people do still want to be cowboys.—Kat Kinsman