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.

"This heartbreaking love story is as profound as it is relentlessly unsentimental. Life brings two young drifters together, sets them apart and their long agony begins. The genius of the story lies in its edgy dialogue and Proulx's depiction of a simple truth - powerlessness. It is her best work and also one of the finest American short stories yet written." Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

"Sexy, sad and powerful, this is a beautiful, mesmerising tale." Elle

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.

Annie Proulx is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and the acclaimed Accordion Crimes. She is also the author of a previous short story collection, Heart Songs.