Close Range, by Annie Proulx (Fourth Estate, £6.99 in UK)

Proulx's stern and ironic tone cuts through this tough, physical collection with marksman's accuracy. There are no heroes, no mythology; her characters are losers, loners, misfits and the lost. Her humour is black and surfaces in sharp jabs. While pondering the extensive acne pitting another's face, one character can't help wondering "how he shaved without bleeding to death". Proulx doesn't use language; she goads it. Having moved her world from Vermont to Wyoming, the geological heartland of the US and the most sparsely populated state of the Union, her fiction remains as uncompromising as her new landscape. Though not as strong a collection overall as the superb Heartsongs, published in the US as long ago as 1987 but not in Britain until 1994, Close Range is a good book dominated by one masterpiece: "Brokeback Mountain". This heartbreaking love story is as profound as it is relentlessly unsentimental. Life brings two young drifters together, sets them apart and their long agony begins. The genius of the story lies in its edgy dialogue and Proulx's depiction of a simple truth - powerlessness. It is her best work and also one of the finest American short stories yet written.