Recommendations
Books Like Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
For readers of the great Wyoming love story
If you loved Brokeback Mountain — Ennis and Jack's summer on the mountain, the twenty years of brief meetings and long silences, Proulx's compressed and devastating prose — these novels and stories share the same territory: love that cannot be spoken, the American West as the landscape of both freedom and confinement, and the emotional weight of what is not said.
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Buy on AmazonClose Range: Wyoming Stories
by Annie Proulx
The essential companion — Brokeback Mountain is published in this collection alongside eight other Wyoming stories that establish the landscape, economy, and social world; the proper way to read the story is in its full context.
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Buy on AmazonBad Dirt
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's second Wyoming story collection — the companion in her Wyoming fiction; the later stories return to the same Wyoming landscape and some of the same social pressures that shape Ennis and Jack's world.
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Buy on AmazonGiovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
Baldwin's novel about an American in Paris and the man he loves — the earlier American literary treatment of the same territory of love that cannot be acknowledged; the companion in American fiction about gay love and the violence its concealment requires.
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Buy on AmazonCall Me By Your Name
by Andre Aciman
Aciman's novel about a summer love affair in Italy — the companion in the tradition of fiction about a brief, defining love that shapes everything after; Elio and Oliver's summer is the Italian, more lyrical version of Ennis and Jack's summer on the mountain.
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Buy on AmazonThe Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
Proulx's Pulitzer-winning novel — the companion in her fiction about specific American (and North American) landscapes; where Brokeback Mountain is Wyoming, The Shipping News is Newfoundland; both show how place shapes the people who inhabit it.
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Buy on AmazonWinter's Bone
by Daniel Woodrell
Woodrell's Ozarks novel — the companion in American fiction rooted in a specific impoverished rural landscape; Ree Dolly's Missouri is the Ozark version of the Wyoming world that Proulx writes about — a place where people are shaped by economic necessity and a specific culture's codes.
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Buy on AmazonThe Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in literary fiction about love that cannot be fully expressed; the three women's lives are structured around the same kind of restrained, devastating emotional weight that Proulx achieves in Brokeback Mountain.
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Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer-winning Western epic — the companion in the tradition of the American West as a landscape that shapes and limits the men who inhabit it; Gus and Call's friendship, never fully articulated, is the non-romantic companion to Ennis and Jack's love in its emotional reticence.
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