Brokeback Mountain

This is the story on which the motion picture was based. The film is absolutely true to the story, even to using the same dialogue at times. I had actually seen the film first and been so impressed that I wanted to read the story.

Make sure you read the story also. It demonstrates the same passion and love and loss as the film. It also demonstrates the same fear and inability to let go and grab all that life offers.

My hat off to Annie. I am also a writer and I wish I had half her talent.

"Brokeback Mountain", as a story, is a miracle of concision and psychological insight. As a screenplay, it is a model in the art of adaptation and richly merits its Oscar. This dual text belongs in the library of every aspiring screenwriter and every serious filmgoer.

I first read Annie Proulx's 'Bad Dirt' short stories, and was inspired to delve deeper into her Wyoming tales.
Brokeback Mountain was, for me, a wonderfully evocative movie of forbidden love between two unsophisticated cowboys, who never expected to find it in the high country of Brokeback Mountain. On reading the book which inspired the movie, I realised that the film's director, Ang Lee, had perfectly captured the essence of Annie Proulx's story. She has a beautiful style. Her stories may be only twenty pages long, but that's all you need. She has the ability to create an image that rings totally true, and captures the simplicity of cowboy country life in a unique way. I loved these stories!

The original story with the preface, the screenplay and in particular the author's essay were invaluable resources of insight into the creative process of filmmaking. Each individual piece is as moving as the film itself. An important reference that is sure to be picked up by a number of great film schools in the years to come.

I really enjoyed reading what it took for this wonderful short story to be turned into a movie. Annie Proulx's kind thoughtful words were translated beautifully into the screenplay. I read this book before the Oscar's and its pretty easy to see why this story won an award for best adaptaion into a screen play.

Excellent idea, including the short story and essays from all the authors. This book provided a fantastic feel for the evolution of a story and a film. I'd love to see this format again for other adaptations.

Both the short story and screenplay are likely to move you to tears, make you feel like somebody's pulling your guts out hand over hand a yard at a time, as Annie Proulx writes of Ennis. They can also make you treasure love more. Proulx's prose is pure poetry. The screenplay is a terrific read and a faithful adaptation and expansion. It's fascinating to have them side by side, to see how certain characters and events were fleshed out... how, for example a single sentence (about a terrible misunderstanding of Jack's, for those who know the story) became a tear-jerking three-page sequence of scenes. The story, script and movie all add depth to each other, like three tellings of the same tale that emphasize different shades. If you're interested in delving deeper into the lives and loves of these characters and the starkly beautiful honesty of this world, buy this book. In addition to the story and script, the book includes three eloquent essays by Proulx and each of the screenwriters, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. These offer a good deal of insight and color to the story and whole development process, from Proulx's germ of an idea for a short story to the screenwriters shepherding the project for years, to each of their reactions to the final film. Fascinating and powerful. Strongly recommended.

I was hugely impressed with this book. Having loved the film, I wasn't expecting the book to surprise me, but I wanted to include it in the A level reading list that I teach. It's an excellent short story in that it is so superbly structured; succinct yet lyrical, sparse yet sweeping in emotion. The landscapes mirror the loneliness and yearning of the Jack and Ennis. This is not book about sex. it's about love and freedom in the face of society's obscene determination to crush it.Beautiful and deeply moving; left me wanting to read her other work.

"Brokeback Mountain" deservedly won the Oscar (2006) for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana fleshed-out an illustrative and poignant script from the skeleton of Annie Proulx's short story. The ability to read and compare them side-by-side in one manuscript is an illuminating experience into the art of screen-writing.

Wanted to read the original before I ventured to the movies -
It deals with strong friendship/love of 2 cowboys and the affect this had on them for years - Love is love - I don't care who goes to bed with whom - The passion of the relationship is detailed and the only thing that got me is they jumped into the sack pretty quickly after they met when on a sheep ranch. Seriously, this is the thing that bothered me. Passion can do a lot of things. The ending is sad and you see one cowboy staying true to his heart and paying the consequenses and the other taking the high road.
Very nicely done.
The script was true to the short story and both give heart to the words.

An excellent supplement to a superb movie. The transition from short story to screenplay to film is very interesting and informative of the creative process. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed the movie and /or enjoys fine writing and critical comment.

'Brokeback Mountain: Story To Screenplay' by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurty, and Diana Ossana (2005) offers readers the opportunity to appreciate the two textual sources from which the exceptional 2005 Ang Lee was derived. McMurty, of course, is the author of 'The Last Picture Show' (1966) and the brilliant screenplay of the 1971 film of the same title.

Proulx's short story has enjoyed an esteemed and prestigious career. First published in the New Yorker in 1997, it went on to win the National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize; Proulx herself has won the Pulitzer Prize.

However, 'Brokeback Mountain' is a short, fairly pedestrian tale told in the clipped, self-consciously restrained Hemingway style. In the included essay, 'Getting Movied,' Proulx states that "it was a hard story to write," and "the story went through more than sixty revisions"; unfortunately, Proulx's difficulties and concerted efforts show everywhere on the page. Elsewhere, Ossano praises its "rawness and power" and describes being wracked by "deep, gut-wrenching sobs" upon finishing it; McMurty refers to it as "a masterpiece."

These admissions by the author, and the extreme praise by her adapters, can only inspire readers to question the literary sophistication of all three. It's difficult to believe that anyone conversant with Euripides, Shakespeare, Hilda Doolittle, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Jean Genet, Erskine Caldwell's 'Tobacco Road' (1932) and 'God's Little Acre' (1933) or even Andrew Holleran's 'The Dancer From The Dance' (1978) could be as moved as McMurty and Ossana appear to have been over what is essentially an unimaginative and humdrum tale that almost any competent craftsmen could produce to order.

The problem is not the theme or subject matter, but the manner in which Proulx executes her story: sentences like "A slow corrosion worked between Ennis and Alma, no real trouble, just widening water" underscore the tale's failed style, which attempts to sound down-home but simply sounds contrived and artificial. Proulx acknowledges that writing 'Brokeback Mountain' was an unusually powerful personal and creative experience, but the text is defined by an artificial gloss of 'tastefully' repressed emotion which isn't persuasive or touching in the least.

'Brokeback Mountain' was published, with unfortunate prescience, just before the Matthew Shepard tragedy occurred in Wyoming, where the story takes place. But readers should remember that homophobia and corresponding acts of violence certainly aren't limited to rural or suburban America, as urban 'hate crime' statistics reveal year after year. Nor are same-sex unions necessarily more conspicuous outside of large cities. 'Brokeback Mountain' is set in the more innocent period of the 1960s and 1970s; it certainly seems feasible that Jack and Ennis might have bought a ranch together in a different part of the state--or in another state altogether--and simply passed as brothers or cousins.

Another potential trouble is that Proulx seems to conceptualize people in terms of externalized 'types': before meeting Ang Lee, she frames him in her mid as "A Taiwanese-born director, probably a thoroughgoing urbanite, who had recently recreated The Hulk" and doubts that they would have anything to say to one another. Before attempting another story of same-sex love or homophobia, Proulx might consider reading Kinsey's 'Sexual Behavior in the Human Male' (1948), C. A. Tripp's 'The Homosexual Matrix' (1975), and even Gore Vidal's heretical 'Myra Breckinridge' (1968) to get a more balanced and accurate view of the vicissitudes of human sexuality. Perhaps not surprisingly, Lee's film reflects the depth, keen understanding, and subtly concerning its subject that Proulx's story does not.

Reading McMurty and Ossana's screenplay is almost as powerful an experience as viewing Lee's poignant film, and their work provides this volume with its real value.

The year is 1963 and the tapestry unfolds along a small rural town in Wyoming. Laborers in farming by trade, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar are young men looking for work. As fate would have it, they are given work as sheep herders on Brokeback Mountain. For the next three months they journey into the the high grass lands of Wyoming with their task at hand, but are given strict orders to have separate camps by night. Hours turn into days, and days turn into weeks as both men appear reserved and sometimes withdrawn. The force of loneliness begins to take hold, and they slowly form a friendship that matures into an emotional and physical bond, one very cold mountain night. Their time on the mountain is all to brief and the job comes to an end. Uncertain is their future that their paths may cross again, as both men go their separate ways.

Four years has now passed since their initial encounter, and we find Ennis married and living in Wyoming with two daughters. We also find Jack has found marriage and a newborn son in what appears to be a normal life. Alas the emptiness becomes unbearable for Jack's will, as his heart longingly seeks to be with Ennis. By hope and by chance, Jack sends a postcard to Wyoming's General delivery looking for Ennis. It reads; "Friend, this letter is long overdue, will be coming through on the 24th. Drop me a line to say if your there". Jack's heart races when he learns he has found Ennis when a post card arrives with the words written "You bet".

Over the course of the next 15 years, Jack and Ennis continue their affair at a camp site on Brokeback. Jack wants more than their brief encounters, but Ennis appears to keep Jack at arms length as each rendevous becomes difficult to plan. Jack's proposes that he and Ennis get a farm together and raise livestock, but his idea is quickly dismissed. Ennis's love for Jack is more complicated as he tries to explain why he thinks the plan won't work. Ennis tells Jack of a story that as a young boy growing up in a small town, there used to be talk of these two older men who were confirmed bachelors. None of the town folk were fooled though, and one day one of the men goes missing. Days later the body of a man that had been drug by horses with a rope tied to his genitals is found in the mountains. Ennis remembers his dad taking him and his little brother to see the horror, only to have it imprinted in his young mind forever. Carrying this fear into his adult life he suspects it was his dad's way of warning his young boys of what is not tolerated. Ennis fears that if their love and passion gets a hold of them at the wrong moment or place, that they're finished. Ennis tries to reason with Jack, citing that both of their obligations to their families should sustain them, even though their hearts are with each other. As art would imitate life, their love for each other is fated by random acts of cruel ironies.

The novel is remarkable and heart breaking. I came away speechless while I journeyed through their anguish and torment. A forbidden love, only to be complicated by emotional turmoil, and society's inability to overcome disdain for the un-accepted.

I wanted so much to see how the book translated to the big screen and went to see it with an open mind. I can say that without a doubt that the movie is so rich and complex, which only enhances the tale of these characters as they are given the breath of life. The landscape and beauty that surround the movie is much more than a backdrop and cannot be described by mere words. Wonderous in it's visual delight to the eyes and heart, while the ride of visceral emotions, takes your breath away. You truly can feel the force of their love for each other as it stirs in the pit of your stomach. You will never think of love the same way again.

The book was outstanding, however I'm not entirely sure it was evident when I bought the book that it was only 64 pages! Entertaining, but not worth the price and shipping for just 30 minutes of my time.

this is a very compelling and heart wrenching story. i enjoyed reading it after seeing the movie because it was interesting to see how the small details were incorporated into the movie. however, in my person opinion, the movie is better. maybe just because i saw it first...and it always makes me cry.

While this is certainly a remarkable and engrossing short story,I must complain about this particular edition.This is a single short story in a very thin booklet(I cannot in good conscience call this a book) which the publisher has priced at almost ten dollars capitalizing on the movie tie-in (the cover has a photo of its two male stars.)

The same ten dollars(at least on the store) will buy you a hardcover edition of the collection from which this single story is taken.

This is greed at its worst.

I was not impressed or especially moved by this short story, primarily because the characters fell flat. One's time and money would be better spent on the movie inspired by this book. The movie breathed life into these characters in a way that the book never achieved.

[Please excuse the asteriks, the store rejected this review, I guess because of "obscenities" -- never mind that it's in the name of great literature]

Attempting to write a review for one of the most powerful short stories of all time that was adapted into one of the most epic and beautiful movies of all time is daunting to say the least. Who am I to offer Annie Proulx a critique? But I'm a reader, and if not me, than who? It goes without saying that Proulx has a way with words, she knows how to choose the exact word that will punch you from behind, something unexpected that etches itself in your mind in an almost surreal way. The details of the love story between two raw, rough, uneducated ranch hands need not be illuminated here, there are plenty of reviews already doing that, and most of us have seen the movie, so I will just concentrate on Proulx's sparse, lyrical writing. Proulx has a way of combining heart-swellingly beautiful depictions of wild, rural scenery with the rough and tumble every day, such as Ennis pi**sing in a sink, Jack's dad pi**ing on him, the stink of s*men and s**t after Jack and Ennis's violently lustful encounters (they are much more romantic in the movie). But even the movie's erotic scenes couldn't quite live up to Proulx's description of their reunion after four years: "They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard..." And I don't know if anyone has described that indescribable euphoric feeling that accompanies falling in love better than Proulx did when she said of Ennis, after a night of drinking and talking with Jack: "he felt he could paw the white out of the moon."

But at the risk of sounding grandiose or ignorant, I'm just going to say that Proulx somehow manages to get away with stuff that would have had my journalism teachers red-inking my prose in horror. For instance, she describes Ennis's shirt as "button-gaping," a nonsensical descriptor that sounds nice but means nothing. She describes Ennis's legs as "caliper legs" and no matter how hard I looked I could find no evidence that a caliper, which is a measuring tool, could be used as an adjective. Then there is the "treacherous, drunken light" -- how can light be drunken? Perhaps it's the writer in me, but these jobby cacologies would occasionally bring me out of the story. Perhaps Proulx's writing is so far above most that she's allowed the freedom to just make it up as she goes, sort of like how the Beatles' St. Pepper album lyrics will have you scratching your head, but bobbing your feet at the same time.

But anyway, if you enjoy hard-hitting prose and a tragic love story that will stay with you for days, then don't waste any more time, get this book.

Oh my gosh, this was so emotionally overwhelming... Nonetheless, I will try to calm down to write this review.

First of all, the story was artistically brilliant! From a storytelling point of view, the pacing was good, not too slow, not too fast; the tension was nice too. Anne Proulx also has a way of choosing the key points of Jack and Ennis's relationship, so you feel that no time is wasted, everything shown is important. Aside from the great storytelling, I was particularly impressed by the prose. The rhythm of the sentences was pleasing, and many of the setting descriptions were beautiful, original, and even evoked the mood of the story very well.

Character development was good too, though I feel like Jack had a deeper development and complexity than Ennis, but that's not really a problem because Jack seems to be the main focus of the story, not Ennis. (Even though the story is overall about their relationship.) I quite like Jack's name, by the way--"Jack Twist" sounds so cool! It kind of reflects his personality, at least to some extent.

In addition, I enjoyed reading their dialogues. They speak in a very different way from mine, and their style of talking is so expressive! Moreover, I'm very used to seeing characters who are rather literate or eloquent, so it was a cool change to read about characters who are not that verbally skilled, so to speak. Their difficulty in articulating how they feel adds to the drama and pathos!

Another thing I want to mention, is that I found it an eye-opener how Anne Proulx understates so much, but slips in occasional revelations of deep feeling, and the result is a lot of emotional tension under the surface.

Ang Lee's powerfully moving cinematic translation of Annie Proulx's masterful short story, "Brokeback Mountain", is obviously turning into a cultural phenomenon. So much so that not only is there the inevitable movie tie-in book (actually the original short story bound in a new softcover with the movie poster), but there is also a much-deserved resurgence in sales for her 2000 short story collection, "Close Range", which provides the broader context for "Brokeback Mountain" (it concludes the book). With the increasing success of the film in its smartly planned roll-out, we now have the story-to-screenplay tome. This would seem like overkill were it not for the fact that Proulx's original story is a remarkable piece of sparingly written fiction and that Lee's film, thanks to screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, is a wondrously faithful translation of her vision.

Through a series of narrative ellipses, Proulx presents a palpable love story about two ranch hands, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who meet and become obsessed with one another. First published in the New Yorker in 1997 and greeted with much acclaim, the story is less about coming to terms about the characters' sexual proclivities and more about their inability to act upon those heretofore untapped emotions toward a greater happiness. Even though both men marry and have children, neither can fully acknowledge the love they feel toward each other because of the steep price that their love carries and they can only express themselves privately for more than twenty years. Suffice it to say the story is stunning in its preciseness and evocation of the contemporary West, but on first read, it hardly beckons a screen treatment.

Yet, if anyone can do it, the reclusive McMurtry has the credentials given his masterworks as both novelist and screenwriter - "Lonesome Dove", "The Last Picture Show" and "Terms of Endearment". With his longtime writing partner Ossana, the obvious challenge was expanding Proulx's story without getting verbose and compromising the emotional tone or integrity of the core story. The final script is 110 pages long, and it is a testament to McMurtry's and Ossana's talent that only one-third is taken up by the original story. Their approach was to take Proulx's words verbatim and augment many of the narrative ellipses, the most obvious opportunity in adding dimension to the women in the two men's lives. It is fascinating to read how the wives, Alma and especially Lureen, transform from background figures into vivid characters with their own unspoken feelings in the screenplay. The other significant aspect that resonates is how the script captures what Proulx painted in words about the landscape and the silent moments among the characters. Reading the wondrous screenplay makes me appreciate the effort it takes to visualize a story that was meant to be left to the imagination.

There are also three essays included in the book - individual accounts by Proulx, McMurtry and Ossana. What comes across clearly is how they all have strong synchronicity about the final screenplay. Proulx's essay, "Getting Movied", is the most interesting in that she tells us the genesis of the story through years of subliminal observation in her adopted home of Wyoming. It apparently started when she saw an old ranch hand in a bar packed with good-looking women, yet he was only watching the guys in a furtive fashion. This image so affected Proulx that she counted back from his age and decided to set the story in the 1960's when he would have been a young man. She ruminated on the themes of rural homophobia and the internalized challenges of gay men in these areas. It's obvious that Proulx tapped into something deeper and that McMurtry and Ossana have been able to make even more tangible.

Started reading The Shipping News, realized Proulx is my new favorite person, became insatiable, became impatient, wanted suddenly to be ambushed, stabbed by quiet poignancy, emotional grit, then left alone to stand it. Only thing for that kind of mood is a short story. Better I think in audio too, to be taken into confidence by a steady, calm voice, and later deprived of it. So much of the mood, atmosphere, whatever you want to call it, comes from the way the characters talk. I can understand how this so naturally became a movie, like slipping into an old pair of jeans and remembering where you were and who you were with when you wore them last. It’s wondrous to me when a writer manages to capture that feeling of familiarity or comfort. It’s indescribable, and unendurable when it’s gone. Brokeback Mountain is a story about a person who's found their person, and it only matters what gender they are because someone out there’s got a tire iron and not enough people know what love is.

Brokeback Mountain seems to elicit an extraordinarily strong, often emotional response from audiences everywhere. It is a film easy to become obsessed with, and this book might just be the thing for anyone who wants more - though those with hopes of finding some sort of redemption to ease the pain of the movie's starkly desolate ending will be disappointed. Annie Proulx's original, magnificent short story (reprinted in full, including the italicized intro that was not in the original New Yorker publication) is even sparer and more brutal than the film, and at least as powerful. Her Jack and Ennis are rather less glamorous than Gyllenhaal and Ledger (for one thing, Gyllenhaal's teeth are way too perfect), and somewhat more explicit in their discussions of their predicament. The way Proulx weaves the presence of nature into their story, so that the wind, the mountains, the vast plains become an organic part of the tragedy, is marvellous. It is equally marvellous to see how McMurtry and Ossana took this lump of gold and forged it into a jewel of a screenplay (one that laid around in Hollywood desk drawers quite a while as the best unfilmable script around). In fact, the second part of this book presents us with a somewhat problematic mixture of screenplay and shooting script, dated October 2005 (after completion of the film, that is). The text is very close but not identical to the movie; descriptions also contain several discrepancies to what is seen on screen; and the timeline, especially towards the end, appears to be garbled. On the other hand it does include such elements as Ennis's swapping of the shirts, which was an on set idea of Ledger. Short story and screenplay have much in common, and share large swathes of dialogue. But they also cover different ground, and the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The story fleshes out Jack's history and allows a look inside Ennis's mind; the screenplay makes dramatic characters out of the women and children, who are as much victims of forces beyond their control as the men are. It also turns Ennis into rather more of a conundrum than he is in the story (or, for that matter, in a 2003 version of the screenplay).

On initial viewing, one of the things that makes the film so compelling is the fact that it does not spell out all the answers - it is no coincidence that BBM discussion boards are buzzing with (at times highly outlandish) interpretations. This book is fascinating because it makes you aware that in fact nearly all the answers ARE there, but hidden under the surface. I found its reading enriched my experience of the film considerably (and turned renewed viewing in to some kind of exquisite self-inflicted torture...). By the way, the screenplay is of course also a great help to those who - due to either Ennis's mumbling, the heavy accents, or both - have trouble understanding everything that is being said.

The book is rounded off with three brief essays, from Proulx, McMurtry and Ossana. McMurtry's is cursory, rather pointless, and vaguely unpleasant. The other two however are engrossing and contain enlightening angles on the film and the story. Proulx forcefully slams the notion of the "gay cowboy movie" and points out that the theme of BBM is the destructive force of rural homophobia. As she makes clear, a sexual relationship like that of Jack and Ennis is no far-fetched fantasy but a reality of life in the Mid West (as everywhere). Interestingly, sex between men is not what bothers society; it's love between men that society can't abide. A thought like that allows a whole new take on the scene in which Joe Aguirre confronts Jack with his knowledge of Jack and Ennis's sexual exploits. Aguirre is hardly a paragon of moral indignation - he's seen it all before and even has a cute colloquial phrase for it; he's merely exasperated that his employees weren't doing the work they were paid to do. Ossana poignantly links the story of Jack and Ennis to the killing of Matthew Shephard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998: the destructive processes shown in BBM are very much with us still.

Obviously, the eight pages of black-and-white stills are a far cry from the film's visual splendours. Worse, in its avoidance of any scene depicting intimacy between the men (and its eagerness to include a lot of boy-girl images), the selection is simply hypocritical. On the other hand, even in this modest incarnation, the image of the two shirts on their worn hanger next to a postcard of Brokeback Mountain leaves no doubt that it is already a classic cinematic icon, and one of the most inspired endings to any movie ever. For those who have trouble recovering from their devastation after seeing the film, the end of the full credits list that completes the book also contains some helpful information: "The characters and events depicted in this photoplay are fictitious".

First published in the New Yorker magazine in 1997, this powerful short story won the National Magazine Award for Fiction and an O. Henry Award. Exploding the stereotype of the cowboy, author Annie Proulx creates a passionate love story between two young ranch hands who believe their love and relationship are unique. Both are nineteen, and neither will entertain the thought that he might be gay ("I'm not no queer...it's a one-shot thing.").

In vibrant prose filled with unusual images of nature, Proulx depicts the intensity of their love, which first begins in a high pasture on Brokeback Mountain, where they tend sheep and sleep in a tent to protect the sheep from predators. From the outset, nineteen-year-old Ennis del Mar is so elated with the company of the equally young Jack Twist that he "felt he could paw the white out of the moon." When their attraction suddenly bursts into passion, they feel themselves "flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk's back." And when, at the end of the season, they bring the sheep down the mountain, "the mountain boiled with demonic energy," and Ennis "felt he was in a slow-motion, but headlong, irreversible fall."

At the end of the season, they separate, and over the next twenty years they both live as straight men, seeing each other rarely, and keeping their love a secret. Ennis has never forgotten the time when he was nine and his father took him to see the remains of a gay man who was tortured, then beaten to death with a tire iron. His father laughed about this atrocity, regarding it as appropriate punishment for the man's violation of the "western code."

Proulx concentrates on themes and on the intensity of the men's love story, subordinating everything else, including her imagery and character development, to it. The dramatic ending conjures up images from the beginning of the story on Brokeback Mountain and ties all the details together, while the thematic line "If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it," which is first spoken at the story's turning point, is repeated in the conclusion for emphasis. Inexorable forces act on Ennis and Jack throughout the story, some forces originating in nature and some coming from other men--and Ennis and Jack just "gotta stand it." n Mary Whipple

Brokeback Mountain is a poem hidden away under beautiful prose. It is a short story, about 55 pages, yet it is profoundly heartwarming, with a subtle flow of true emotions and comes across as a refreshing, cool, light rain showering on your heart but comes back to haunt you and touches your soul in the deepest way.

I had seen the movie last year. It was kind of slow, but the beauty of the story was uniquely brilliant. So when I saw the book at the library I instantly grabbed it and read it within a couple of hours. It is all about 2 guys, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, coming to know each other while herding sheep on Brokeback mountain. It is the sad story of their difficult lives, separate yet entwined, and your heart reaches out to them. It is a remarkably enchanting story of forbidden love and longing.

The prose is astoundingly elegant and beautiful. Annie Proulx, critically acclaimed author and Pulitzer prize winner, writes as if painting a beautiful picture. The story flows like a serene river - quiet, beautiful, calm and exceedingly sure of itself. See a couple of excerpts to get a taste of her eloquent prose-

"They stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still usable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go"."

"Without getting up he threw deadwood on the fire, the sparks flying up with their truths and lies, a few hot points of fire landing on their hands and faces, not for the first time, and they rolled down into the dirt. One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough."

... and I never get enough of stories as beautifully told as this. Never enough.

5 stars, if not more.

I read (...)Brokeback Mountain(...)by (...)Annie Proulx(...)maybe about a week and a half ago. I just haven't had time to write a review on it (bad me!). I'm generally not a fan of Proulx's writing style - I tried to get into <a href =-(...)The Shipping News(...) not too long ago and had a majorly difficult time.

I read it twice and each time, I gathered a deeper understanding and appreciation for Jack and Ennis, the two main characters. As I'm sure everyone that has not been living under a rock for the past few months knows, this is the story about two cowboys in the early '60's who meet each other while working as cowhands on Brokeback Mountain. They are alone together a lot early on in the relationship and appreciate each other's company. Then one night, they have sex and that changes everything.

This is a story about love and timing. These two young men meet and fall in love at the wrong time; at a time when homosexuality was more villified than it is now (if that can be); when each of them becomes married and begin families of their own. What I particularly liked about this short story, is that Proulx is very sparse with her words. A lot of the pressures that the two men feel is implied, but is there nonetheless. It requires multiple readings to pick up on the signals and cues, which is an indicator of Proulx's brilliance as an author.

What I also appreciated, and what I think many other readers have and will appreciate, is that I, as a reader, actually connected with and related to the main characters. It could have been me in their shoes, regardless of whether I was straight, bi or a lesbian. I sympathized with the characters and, for the first time in a long while, I cried when the book was done.

Highly recommended!