Short story by Annie Proulx published in The New Yorker June 22, 1998. The Mud Below is the tale of Diamond Felts - a small-time rodeo rider with a painful family past behind him. His mother was adamant against him going into the rodeo, but he did it anyway. And now he travels around to little dusty towns, and takes his chances on massive heaving bulls. Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this breathtaking tale of loneliness, quick violence, and desperation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent—by an author writing at the peak of her craft
Author
Edna Annie Proulx is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. Brokeback Mountain received massive critical acclaim and went on to be nominated for a leading eight Academy Awards, winning three of them. (However, the movie did not win Best Picture, a situation with which Proulx made public her disappointment.) She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards. She has written most of her stories and books simply as Annie Proulx, but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.
