fishing

John Gierach is the best fishing writer alive. This collection of essays about fly fishing in Colorado and beyond is vintage Gierach: dry, wry, and populated with the kind of characters who drive hours for a rumor of trout. Nobody captures the obsession better.

Cultural historian Mark Kurlansky, author of the bestselling books such as Cod, Salt, and Milk, turns his signature deep-dive lens to another focus, that of salmon, which until quite recently roamed abundantly wild throughout the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Textbook in size yet lyrically reverent, Salmon is a four-hundred page ode to a fish “beautiful in its many phases; thrilling in its athleticism; poetic in its heroic and tragic life story.” With stunning images both modern and historical—such as a massive, sixty-four pound Atlantic salmon caught on a rod in the British Isles or a Tlakuit fisherman using a dip net on the Columbia in 1910—and even a few recipes for beer bread and chowder, Kurlansky covers seemingly every angle of river dams, fisheries, aquaculture, and piscine ecology. From Japan’s markets to Alaska’s Bristol Bay, Salmon reveals the long, fabled journey of a fish whose survival is intertwined with our own.

Essays about the obsessive life of the fly fisher — the rivers, the hatches, the solitude, and the nagging suspicion that all this time on the water means something beyond catching fish. The title says everything about the tone.

Stripped-down fly fishing — tenkara rods, simple flies, no reels. The fishing equivalent of the climbing philosophy that built Patagonia: less gear, more attention.

Frazier on fishing — which means Frazier on rivers, weather, patience, and the particular pleasure of standing in water trying to outsmart something with a brain the size of a pea.

A beautiful, comprehensive guide to the culture and practice of fly fishing — technique, gear, destinations, and the philosophy that makes it more than a hobby.

McPhee on shad — the fish that fed the Continental Army, filled the rivers of the eastern seaboard, and is now mostly forgotten. Only McPhee could make a fish biography this compelling.

Peter Heller’s previous novel, The River, moved as swiftly and eventfully as class V whitewater, but not all readers were pleased with its denouement (one AJ editor and Heller fan threw his copy against the wall in protest). The Guide, though, will likely salve. It opens three years after The River, when Jack, a young Colorado rancher and guide, takes a last-minute gig at an ultra-exclusive fly-fishing lodge near Crested Butte. Spinning with grief, he’s hoping for healing, or at least distraction, but finds trouble the moment he drives up the narrow canyon. The property is bordered, his irritable manager warns, by one neighbor who shoots at interlopers and another whose dogs killed a trespassing angler. Heller, a fly fisherman himself, casts words as poetry, whether describing a backlit hatch, rigging a rod, or “the spreading rings of rising trout, dapping silently like slow rain,” but it’s the mystery that hooks you. Why is there a hidden camera in Jack’s cabin thermostat? And why do you need a gate code to get out?

The 1991 nor'easter that sank the Andrea Gail and killed six fishermen off the Grand Banks. Junger reconstructs the storm, the boat, and the lives of the men aboard with the narrative intensity of a novelist.

A comic novel about a young fly-fishing obsessive in the Pacific Northwest who retreats to a cabin on an Oregon river and discovers that catching fish isn't the same as understanding them. The funniest serious fishing novel ever written.