Brokeback Mountain Now a Major Motion Picture

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. This special edition celebrates the story that captured hearts worldwide and became an Academy Award-winning film.

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—something neither man expected and neither can forget.

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.

This is the kind of story that stays with you long after you turn the final page—a meditation on love, loneliness, and the courage it takes to live authentically. Whether you discovered it through the film or are coming to it fresh, Proulx’s original story offers an intimacy and rawness that only fiction can achieve.

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