If I could recommend every story in Close Range, a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, I would. Proulx is a writer who belongs to the Wyoming prairies and this story of Diamond Felts, a rodeo rider with a desolate past and a proclivity for violent sexual assault, is a bleak, honest look at life on the edges of rural America.
“The shock of the violent motion, the lightning shifts of balance, the feeling of power as though he were the bull and not the rider, even the fright, fulfilled some greedy physical hunger in him he hadn’t known was there.”
First published in The New Yorker, 1998, available here. Collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Scribner, 1999
A Personal Anthology 