Annie Proulx's latest short stories focus on the new West Annie Proulx's third collection of Wyoming stories, "Fine Just the Way It Is," proves one thing above all: Her love affair with her adopted state has been a boon for fiction set in the American West. East Coast critics have tended to stamp Western fiction automatically as regional, but Proulx's writing is difficult to pigeonhole even when her geographic focus is small, as these nine stories attest, as did her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Shipping News," set in Newfoundland. Although her Wyoming characters are often Western types -- ranchers, cowpokes, bull riders -- most live in a new West, where history and myth inform rather than define their lives. They are regional in the way Faulkner's characters are regional: Grounded in a specific culture and place, they struggle with illusions, disappointments and hopes common to us all....