Fishing Stories nets an abundant catch of wonderful writing in a wide variety of genres and styles. The moods range from the comedy of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘On Dry-Cow Fishing as a Fine Art’ and Jerome K. Jerome’s ‘Fishy’ to the rural gothic of Annie Proulx’s ‘The Wer-Trout’ and the haunting elegy of Norman Maclean’s ‘A River Runs Through It’.
Many of these tales celebrate human bonds forged over a rod, including Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Two Friends’, Jimmy Carter’s ‘Fishing with My Daddy’ and Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. Some deal in reverence and romance, as in Roland Pertwee’s ‘The River God’, and some in adventure and the stuff of legend, as in Zane Grey’s ‘The First Thousand-Pounder’ and Ron Rash’s ‘Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes’. There are narratives that confront the heartbreaks and frustrations of the sport, from Thomas McGuane’s ‘The Longest Silence’, a meditation on long spells of inaction as the essence of fishing, to Raymond Carver’s masterpiece about a boy’s deflated triumph in ‘Nobody Said Anything’. And alongside the works of literary giants are the memories of people both great and humble who have found meaning and fulfilment in fishing, from a former American president to a Scottish gamekeeper’s daughter.
Whether set on the open ocean or by a mountain stream, in ancient China, tropical Tahiti, Paris under siege, the English seaside or the vast Canadian wilderness, these stories cast wide and strike deep into the universal joys, absurdities, insights, and tragedies of life.
