Name: Telegraph Days
ISBN: 9780743250788

Annie Proulx

Larry McMurtry

Recounts myths of the closing decades of the western frontier viewed through the eyes of Nellie Courtright and her brother Jackson, orphans that make good in the town of Rita Blanca in what would become the Oklahoma Panhandle.

A Novel

Telegraph Days

Now a Major Motion Picture

Brokeback Mountain

Jess

علي

The friendship between Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two cowboys, evolves into an intimate relationship while they are working together as a herder and camp tender, sharing a bond that spans many years and frequent separations.

Andrea Morales

reading this during pride month should be classified as a hate crime … bury your gays

Ville

luca

“One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.”

Katherine Yang

The greatest. A classic. But… Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal? Dear god, yeah, watch the movie.

Trish

This story is every bit as compelling, heart wrenching and beautiful as everyone claims. A true masterpiece of short fiction. 

Update 8/10/16

My mind is still reeling with thoughts of Ennis and Jack; the story was simply intimate and heart breaking. It's amazing how much power and weight words can carry with them. Works like Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton and "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx have taught me that it's about quality, not quantity. Frankly, any author that can move me to tears in less than 100 pages is a supreme writer and artist.

(Bre)anne✨

Arianna M

the bit with the shirts one inside the other!!!!! fuck me

Francis Buggey

Maxie Froelicher

I’m absolutely devastated. I knew I would be but I wasn’t ready for it, though I don’t think I ever would have been ready for it.

Read for the POPSUGAR challenge prompt: A Western

Georgia Carr

Jeremy Anderberg

“There’s no power like outlawry to heat up public curiosity.”

McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove series are among the finest books I’ve ever read. I’ve been nervous to read other McMurtry titles, though. Could the characters possibly live up to McCrae and Call?

While young and spunky Nellie Courtright isn’t Augustus McCrae, the cast in Telegraph Days is quite fun and McMurtry provides a rollicking standalone story that kept me well-entertained for a few days.

Nellie and her brother Jackson are orphaned and make their way to a forgetful little desert town. Sister snags a job as the town telegrapher while brother backs his way into fame by getting extraordinarily lucky with a six-shooter. Nellie then turns writer and cataloguer of courageous deeds, which brings her all over the west—Dodge City, the O.K. Corral, and everywhere else that brought itself infamy in the 1800s.

Honestly, the story itself isn’t all that memorable. Rather, it’s the feeling of the thing that sucks you in and stays with you. It’s the same thing that pulled me into the Lonesome Dove series almost immediately—the empathy that McMurtry puts into his characters is unrivaled. They’re realists about the harsh natural world around them, and yet romantics when it comes to human nature:

“If you want to be part of a human community you have to suffer fools—patiently, if not gladly—and you must practice civility as best you can. . . . the tribe of human beings is never likely to be crowded with Aristotles.”

Telegraph Days won’t be among my absolute favorite reads of the year, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, have no qualms about broadly recommending it.

Caitlyn Johanna Bolton 

The thing that puts me off short stories is they don't give the story enough space to develop.

Daniela V.

Otro libro que leí después de haber visto la película. Puedo decir que la adaptación a la pantalla grande es espectacular y que es una de mis películas favoritas. 

Me sorprendió mucho la poca extensión de este libro, ya que se trata de una historia realmente compleja. Pero una vez que comencé a leer, me maravillé con todas las cosas que Annie Proulx podía transmitir en un simple párrafo.

Si bien es una triste historia de amor, yo diría que la temática principal de la novela son las emociones: el amor, el deseo, la ira y la desilusión.

Ennis del Mar, que en un primer momento se deja llevar por sus impulsos, se rehúsa a luchar por lo que más quiere. Y sólo comprende lo que tenía una vez que los prejuicios se lo quitan. 

El final de esta historia es realmente conmovedor. (view spoiler)[Esa maravillosa línea: "Jack, I swear..." es lo más cercano que Ennis estuvo de decirle a Jack que lo amaba. (hide spoiler)]

Akanksha Chattopadhyay

About 3.5. Read it half in sleep. Might reread.
The style did not sit very well with me.

zilver 

Erin 

I watched the movie version of Brokeback Mountain years ago and absolutely loved it. Maybe because it was about a taboo subject; maybe because it was filmed 2 hours away from where I live. I watched it time and time again, yet I definitely didn't get it - to me it was just another movie. Enter 7 years later in a second-year film course about adaptation from book to film, and I am forced to read the short story. And forced to look in the face a story that I didn't know needed to be told. 

This short story is about 30 pages long, and I felt so many emotions during it. I won't deny that part of it was due to being able to picture it quite clearly due to having seen the film, but I did my best to separate the two. I won't sugar coat it - if you aren't into this genre of story (whether it be cowboys or gay fiction - or gay fiction about cowboys) - you likely won't enjoy it. But if you are interested (at all) in it, you will fall in love. There is something about Annie Proulx's writing that makes me sad and angry and frustrated and devastated all at the same time, but while simultaneously relishing in the moments between the letters, dreading the end as I turn every page. To avoid this getting even more poetic, I'll just say that as far as short stories go (and I was never particularly a fan) this is my favorite, and I doubt that will ever change. Reading about this film and its impact for this essay I have to write makes me revisit those emotions all over again. I would recommend everyone read Brokeback Mountain, especially if you think that certain types of people are off-limits in love, which couldn't be farther from the truth.

 Bruna Acioly Leão

At this point, I am thinking that if a lot of people have not read this short story, at least they are aware of the movie, even if they haven't actually seen it. One of the first queer stories I have ever come into contact with, personally. 

Ennis said, “I’m not no queer,” and Jack jumped in with “Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.” 

This story is about as intense as the movie, but I am not a big fan of movies in general (low attention span), so I definitely am more inclined to prefer the written version of the story. I've seen some people comment that it was too short or rushed to really have an impact, but I disagree. I think a lot of it gets hidden in subtext, yes, because of the limits of the short story format, but that is part of the magic of the short story. You don't get to read everything, but you get to see the important bits. You still get to feel the emotions the characters go through, and that is more important than the working and minutia of everything that happens in their lives. 

Come on, Ennis, you just shot my airplane out a the sky—give me somethin a go on. This ain’t no little thing that’s happenin here.

I am not usually a fan of short stories, but I am not one to enjoy useless information in my stories either, so I think that when an author can concise a story, actually these characters whole lives almost, into just a few pages, that is much more impressive than simply loads of pages of descriptions and plot.

What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger. 

The plot of this story is pretty simple: two cowboys fall in love and spend their whole lives living that, but also denying that. Much more than their actions is their emotions that we get to see and those are what matter the most. In just a few words we get a story about first love, society conformities versus who you really are, homophobia, grief. 

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.

Read the story here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/19...

Telegraph Days A Novel