Collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories.
Read it with your book club →Read the short story after the movie
You already know the story, so the short story can give you what a movie has no room for: what the characters are thinking, the scenes that were cut, and the ending as it was written. If you loved the movie, read this next.
6 more books for people who loved Brokeback Mountain
Brokeback Mountain holds you in the tension between what people feel and what they can say, between momentary freedom and lifelong constraint. It moves quietly through years of stolen weekends and separate lives, letting silence do as much work as dialogue. The landscape is vast but the story is intimate, tracking how desire collides with duty and how small decisions harden into permanent regret. These books share that restraint, that sense of longing pressed against immovable circumstance.
Brokeback Mountain
Brokeback Mountain the film expands Proulx's compressed story of two ranch hands whose summer together becomes the measure against which all other years fail. The prose is sparse and unforgiving, tracking Jack and Ennis across decades with the same harsh Wyoming plainness the film captures. Proulx trusts you to feel the weight of what goes unsaid, giving you their whole lives in fragments: postcards, phone calls, the physical memory of one season. The story moves through time the way regret does, circling back to a single mountain and what was lost there.
Read it with your book club →
Giovanni's Room
Brokeback Mountain watches men caught between desire and the lives they think they must live; Baldwin's novel does the same in a Paris boarding house where an American man tries to reconcile his engagement to a woman with his love for Giovanni. The prose is searching and exact, tracking how David tells himself stories to avoid the truth, how he mistakes escape for freedom. Baldwin lets you see the damage of that hesitation, the way paralysis becomes cruelty. The quiet accumulation of missed chances and chosen lies feels unbearably close.
Read it with your book club →
The Great Believers
Brokeback Mountain measures love against the costs of living it openly; Makkai's novel tracks a circle of friends in 1980s Chicago as the AIDS crisis takes them one by one, and one woman searching for her daughter thirty years later. The structure toggles between eras, letting you feel how grief stretches across time, how survival means carrying the weight of who was lost. Makkai writes intimacy and catastrophe with the same steady hand, never sentimental but deeply tender. The losses accumulate quietly until the scale of them is overwhelming.
Read it with your book club →
The Line of Beauty
Brokeback Mountain shows desire constrained by the world's refusal to make space for it; Hollinghurst's novel follows a young man navigating gay life in 1980s Thatcher-era London, moving through privilege and secrecy as the AIDS epidemic arrives. The prose is elegant and precise, attuned to surfaces and what they conceal: the codes of class, the negotiations of closeted and open lives, the gap between beauty and safety. Hollinghurst lets you see how Nick builds a life in borrowed rooms, always aware of the fragility of his position. The restraint and longing sit in every carefully composed scene.
Read it with your book club →
A Little Life
Brokeback Mountain gives you decades of a life shaped by one immovable wound; Yanagihara's novel tracks four college friends across adulthood, centering on Jude, whose past trauma shadows every attempt at intimacy and connection. The book moves slowly through years of friendship and chosen family, watching how love tries and sometimes fails to reach someone. Yanagihara writes damage and tenderness with unflinching attention, letting you feel the weight of what people carry and the cost of trying to live with it. The emotional scale is vast, the restraint minimal, but the attention to longing and loss is absolute.
Read it with your book club →
The Swimming-Pool Library
Brokeback Mountain holds the past and present in tension, letting you see how one summer defines all the years after; Hollinghurst's novel does the same across generations, as a young gay man in 1980s London discovers an elderly aristocrat's secret history of desire and prosecution. The prose is sensual and exact, moving between the freedoms of the present and the costs of the past, between public restraint and private longing. Hollinghurst writes gay life with attention to its pleasures and its precarity, the way history presses against the body. The elegance never softens the losses.
Read it with your book club →Want books picked for you?
One movie isn’t much to go on. Rate four more — Brokeback Mountain already counts — and the books are picked for you.
Rate four more movies