Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain" (in her first volume of Wyoming Stories) and Bad Dirt (her second), National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral new collection. In "Fine Just the Way It Is," she has expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate.

"Every ranch...had lost a boy," thinks Dakotah Hicks as she drives through "the hammered red landscape" of Wyoming, "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...The trip along this road was a roll call of grief."

Proulx's characters try to climb out of poverty and desperation but get cut down as if the land itself wanted their blood. Deeply sympathetic to the men and women fighting to survive in this harsh place, Proulx turns their lives into fiction with the power of myth -- and leaves the reader in awe. The winner of two O. Henry Prizes, Annie Proulx has been anthologized in nearly every major collection of great American stories. Her bold, inimitable language, her exhilarating eye for detail and her dark sense of humor make this a profoundly compelling collection.

"Her writing is moment by moment intense, and successful as such... What propels the reader through the pages is not the tug of 'who done it' nor the excitement of men with guns coming through doors, but the sheer excellence of the writing." - H.R.F. Keating A car speeds down a road between miles of marshes and estuary flats, its passenger a young woman named Agnes, fresh from a discovery that has turned her world turned upside down. Meanwhile, the news of a body found on the marsh is spreading round the local area, panic following in its wake. A masterpiece of suspense, Mary Kelly's 1962 novel follows Agnes as she casts her mind back through the past few days to find the links between her husband, his friends, a mysterious stranger new to the village and a case of unexplained death. Gripping, intelligent and affecting, Due to a Death was nominated for the Gold Dagger Award and showcases the author's versatility and willingness to push the boundaries of the mystery genre.