#close range

[boardsdonthitback]

Scott Adkins - Close Range (2015)

[devilsskettle]

just out of curiosity…..

have you read the short story ‘brokeback mountain’ and/or seen the movie adaptation?

i have read the short story and i have seen the movie

i have read the short story but i have not seen the movie

i have not read the short story but i have seen the movie

i have not read the short story and i have not seen the movie

Voting ended onDec 12, 2024

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx (1999)?

yes

no

I've read parts of it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onMay 9, 2025

[justxcomthings]

[image source]

JXT: Aura-Farming at Point-Blank Range

[iphigeniarising]

It was wrong what they said about grief. It augered inside you forever, boring fresh holes even when you were sieved.

- Annie Proulx

[shirozen]

Close roach range

[ironpour]

"He was surprised that it was true. He knew he had little talent for friendship or affection, stood armoured against love, though when it did come down on him later it came down like an axe and he was slaughtered by it."

The Mud Below, Annie Proulx

[earhartsease]

we have feelings about the announcement there's going to be a Brokeback Mountain musical - we expect people are going to love it, but our gut feeling is that it can't help but betray one of the core features of the amazing original short story (and the whole book of short stories it's a part of), which is that Ennis and Jack have almost no way to articulate their feelings, to each other or to themselves

the book is full of stories of people suffering the consequences of lacking the language and the capacity to make sense of themselves or to communicate, it's full of incredible loneliness and a real call to not allow ourselves to settle for that

okay maybe this is a subjective view of the stories, but Brokeback Mountain manages to say so much in just a few pages and so much of what it says is "if only they knew how to tell what they were feeling, and to tell each other" and we fear that the musical will be the exact opposite of that and eh, you know what, maybe it's fine that it'll be an entirely different story with superficial similarities if it moves people in positive ways, maybe it's okay

but that story broke us and also galvanised us to be more ourselves more out loud - we read it in the week before going to see the film and it's probably one of the things that helped break up our terrible abusive cishet marriage (since we were neither cis nor het but too afraid of being ourselves to do anything about it for a long time)

sorry, feeling out loud, we can let people have this, we will keep the story we have, it's okay - do read Close Range, the book by Annie Proulx, it's harrowing af, a starkly beautiful and harsh evocation of rural life in Wyoming