Brokeback Mountain [Paperback]

Winner of the US National Magazine Award following its publication in The New Yorker in 1997, Annie Proulx's novella Brokeback Mountain follows her international success with The Shipping News and Accordian Crimes, confirming her status as one of the most powerful and accomplished voices in contemporary American fiction. With remarkable economy of style, Proulx traces the story of a "pair of deuces going nowhere", Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, two ranch hands brought together in the desolate, beautiful landscape of Wyoming.

Herding sheep together on Brokeback Mountain in the spring of 1963, Ennis and Jack's companionability gradually develops into an intense sexual intimacy, much to the apparent surprise of both men. Proulx presents a devastating study of Jack and Ennis' subsequent struggle with both their families and their work as they try to come to terms with their sexual relationship--as it develops alongside their studiedly macho world of drinking, fighting, horses and rodeos, which are brought vividly, and often humorously to life.

In exploring the intimacies and sexual pleasures emerging from this masculine world, Proulx captures with terrible poignancy the destruction and isolation which comes from both men's disavowal of their homosexual desire, a dilemma which is movingly described in the novella's tragic denouement. Looking back on his doomed relationship with Jack Twist, Ennis del Mar reflects:

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.

Brokeback Mountain is a remarkable exploration of the convergence of pain and isolation at the point where desire and disavowal come together between men. Annie Proulx once again at her best. --Jerry Brotton

The author won the Pulitzer Prize as E. Annie Proulx for her novel The Shipping News. As just Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain is her astonishing new work of fiction. Barely 10,000 words long it nevertheless encompasses a world and two lives.

Brokeback Mountain is set in the beautiful, wild landscape of Wyoming where cowboys live as they have done for generations. Hard, lonely lives in unforgiving country. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are two ranch hands – ‘drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, tough spoken’ – glad to have found each other’s company where none had been expected. But companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain, something not looked for, something deadly. In twenty years they grab just a few desperate meetings, grace only in the memory of ‘that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong.’

Brokeback Mountain is set in the beautiful, wild landscape of Wyoming thirty years ago where cowboys lived much as they had done for generations. Hard, lonely lives in unforgiving country. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are two ranch hands – 'drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, tough spoken' – glad to have found each other's company where none had been expected. But companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain, something not looked for, something deadly.

Brokeback Mountain also appears in Close Range, Wyoming Stories.

E. Annie Proulx is the Pulitzer prize winning author of The Shipping News, Postcards and Accordion Crimes. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed short story collection Heart Songs. She lives in Wyoming. Brokeback Mountain is the first story written as Annie Proulx.