Hardcover, USA First Edition First Printing, Signed by author to the title page.

The boards are clean and have no signs of deterioration. The pages are clean and bright, no tears, nicks or creases, no previous owner inscriptions. The book is tight and square.  The VFine dust jacket is bright with original $36.00 cover price. No Remainder marks.

In That Old Ace in the Hole, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx has written an exhilarating story brimming with language, history, landscape, music, and love. The novel, Proulx fourth, is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, and he takes a job with Global Pork Rind -- his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms. Dollar finds himself in a Texas town called Woolybucket, whose idiosyncratic inhabitants have ridden out all manner of seismic shifts in panhandle country. These are tough men and women who survived tornadoes and dust storms, and witnessed firsthand the demise of the great cattle ranches. Now it's feed lots, hog farms, and ever-expanding drylands.

Hardcover, USA First Edition, First Printing, Signed by author to the title page.

The boards are clean and have no signs of deterioration. The pages are clean and bright, no tears, nicks or creases, no previous owner inscriptions. The book is tight and square. The Fine dust jacket is bright with original $25.00 cover price. No Remainder marks.

Contains six water colour illustrations by William Matthews not found in later printings.

Annie Proulx masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below," a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer," an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home.

In "Brokeback Mountain," the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world's violent intolerance. These are stories of desperation, hard times, and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes -- confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, and persistence in the face of difficulty -- with the more benign values of the new west. In a unique collaboration that revives the tradition of the Scribner illustrated classics, Proulx has worked with the artist William Matthews, whose six watercolours create an eloquent visual dialogue.

Stories in Close Range have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

***UNSIGNED ****

HARDCOVER, SCRIBNER NEW YORK 2005 FIRST SEPARATE HARDCOVER EDITION, FIRST PRINTING,

SOFTCOVER WRAP 4TH ESTATE 1998 FIRST UK EDITION (TRUE FIRST) FIRST PRINTING

This novel is set in the beautiful wild landscape of Wyoming among cowboys, its recounts the relationship over twenty years of two ranch hands drop-out country boys with no prospects rough-mannered and tough spoken, glad to have found each other`s company.

Hardcover, USA First Edition, First Printing, Signed by author to the title page.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx follows the success of Close Range with another remarkable collection of short stories set in Wyoming. Bad Dirt is filled with the vivid and wilful characters for which Proulx has become known. Each occupies a community or landscape described in rich and robust language, with an eye for detail unparalleled in American fiction. In 'The Contest', the men of Elk Tooth, Wyoming, vow to put aside their razors for two seasons and wait to see who has the longest beard come the 4th of July. Deb Sipple, the moving protagonist of 'That Trickle Down Effect', finds that his opportunism -- and his smoking habit -- lead to a massive destruction. And 'What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?' is the story of Gilbert Wolfscale, whose rabid devotion to his ranch drives off his wife and sons. Proulx displays her wit in every story of this stunning collection, as well as her knowledge of the West, of history, of ranching and farming. Her profound sympathy for characters who must use sheer will and courage to make it in tough territory makes this collection extraordinarily compelling.

The boards are clean and have no signs of deterioration. The pages are clean and bright, no tears, nicks or creases, no previous owner inscriptions. The book is tight and square. The VFine dust jacket is bright with original $25.00 cover price. No Remainder marks.

Hardcover, First Edition, First Printing Signed by author to title page. E Annie Proulx

A masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. Proulx brings the immigrant experience in America to life through the eyes of the descendants of Mexicans, Poles, Africans, Irish-Scots Franco-Canadians, and many others, all linked by a simple green accordion. The music they make in their  last link with the past. A radical departure from proulx`s familiar Western terrain.