Brokeback Mountain
Annie Proulx · 1997
Twenty-eight pages that contain more longing, grief, and waste than most novels manage in three hundred. Ennis and Jack's summer together and the decades of denial that follow ("I wish I knew how to quit you") is the queer love story that broke into mainstream literary culture. Economical and devastating.
The case against
Forty minutes of reading sold between hard covers after the film. Proulx's compression is the achievement and the limit: Alma and Lureen, the wives whose lives get wrecked alongside, are allotted a few hundred words between them, and the clipped Wyoming syntax (dropped subjects, weather as fate) tips toward mannerism. Misery arrives as a foregone conclusion.
Romance · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
