Brokeback Mountain

A stand alone edition of Annie Proulx’s beloved story ＂Brokeback Mountain＂ (in the collection Close Range)--the basis for the major motion picture directed by Ang Lee, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana.Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, ＂Brokeback Mountain＂ is her masterpiece. Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they’re working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that’s what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of ＂Brokeback Mountain,＂ and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world’s violent intolerance.

Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, including the novel The Shipping News and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story ＂Brokeback Mountain,＂ which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award-winning film. Her most recent novel is Barkskins. She lives in Seattle.

Like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable -- admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears -- rose around them. Ennis stood as if heart-shot, face grey and deep-lined, grimacing, eyes screwed shut, fists clenched, legs caving, hit the ground on his knees.

＂Jesus,＂ said Jack. ＂Ennis?＂ But before he was out of the truck, trying to guess if it was heart attack or the overflow of an incendiary rage, Ennis was back on his feet and somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where they had been, for what theyd said was no news. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved.

What Jack remembered and craved in a way he cold neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.

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