Fishing Stories

The moods range from rollicking humor (Rudyard Kipling's "On Dry-Cow Fishing as a Fine Art") to haunting elegy (Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It") to rural gothic (Annie Proulx's "The Wer-Trout").

Many tales celebrate the bonds forged over a rod and reel, including Maupassant's "Two Friends," Jimmy Carter's "Fishing with My Daddy," and an excerpt from Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden.

Some deal in reverence and romance (Roland Pertwee's "The River God"), some in adventure and the stuff of legend (Zane Grey's "The First Thousand-Pounder"), and some in the heartbreaks and frustrations of the sport (Thomas McGuane's riff on the essence of fishing in "The Longest Silence" and Raymond Carver's gut-wrenching masterpiece "Nobody Said Anything"). 

Casting through the vast waters of experience, these writers find fishing abundant in all the joys, absurdities, insights, and tragedies of life.