Their lives are futile uphill strug kgles conducted as a downhill, out-ofcontrol tearaway. Geography, splendid and terrible, is a tutelary deity to the characters in Close Range. The kind you plan to re-read to appreciate more in depth. Altogether, an amazingly well written book. And then there's the language of the ranchers salted with outrageously funny and/or moving metaphors, often anchored to the sense of sublime that comes from feeling very small in a place that is very, very big.

Human passions of all sorts are described unsentimentally with a raw, brutal precision that rings true to experience through its complete lack of rhetoric. Proulx' prose is a marvel to be studied: the language is economical and taut but at the same time extremely precise (for example in the description of cattle, ranching tools and technologies, vegetation, weather.) and relentlessly attuned to the experience of life on vast and unsympathetic expanses. Or rather, many of the stories in the book have moments that rival if not exceed in beauty those found in the title story. It turns out that not only the title short story 'Brokeback Mountain' is in many ways better than the movie (which is itself already moving to the extreme) but not even the best story in the collection. This collection of stories turned out to be an unexpected treasure. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world’s violent intolerance. 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.

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. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer.īoth men work hard, marry, and have kids because that’s what cowboys do. 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.Īnnie 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.Įnnis 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.

Brokeback mountain short story book buy