Brokeback Mountain

Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are two young ranch hands hired to herd sheep on Brokeback Mountain in the summer of 1963. Alone together for months in the isolation of the high country, their friendship becomes something neither of them expected or is prepared to name. When the season ends, they go back to the lives they're supposed to want — Ennis marries Alma, Jack marries Lureen — but the pull between them doesn't fade.

Over the next two decades, on infrequent "fishing trips" back to Brokeback, Ennis and Jack try to hold onto what they found there, constrained at every turn by the rural Wyoming world they can't leave and can't be honest in. Annie Proulx's spare, unsparing prose follows the cost of that constraint — on their marriages, their children, and each other — to its devastating end.

Originally published in The New Yorker in 1997 and collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Brokeback Mountain is a short story, not a novel — read in one sitting, it has the weight of something much longer.