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.
