Name: Telegraph Days
Rating: 3.732323232323232 (99 reviews)
ISBN: 9780743476911

Larry McMurtry

Orphaned by her father's suicide, Nellie and her brother, Jackson, take jobs in the western town of Rita Blanca, where deputy sheriff Jackson is forced to confront six gunfighter brothers and telegrapher Nellie pursues a romance with Buffalo Bill during the Battle of the O.K. Corral. Reprint.

A Novel

Telegraph Days

Annie Proulx

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.

Brokeback Mountain

sukita

yasi

Now a Major Motion Picture

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

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.

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.

Akanksha Chattopadhyay

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

Telegraph Days A Novel

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