Early Love and Brook Trout: With Watercolor paintings by the author - Hardcover

James Prosek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 158574039X ISBN 13: 9781585740390

Publisher: Lyons Pr, 2000

Synopsis

This is a beautiful book of Prosek's paintings of brookies and woods wildlife, and his throughtful words.

About this title

Review

Early Love evokes a sense of almost trespassing through one of James Prosek's sketchbooks. This fourth book by the precociously prolific author-artist is quite personal, rife with exuberance about fishing and falling in love, and, not surprisingly, the angst that comes with failed relationships. As a writer, he matures with each new work; as a painter, he adds a layer of visual immediacy with his watercolors to his already descriptive prose. Prosek intended this to be a "little book" that would range "lightly over my years from nine to twenty-four, trying to open a window to my thoughts during that time as a river's surface occasionally does to its depths." Like a pool beneath the surface, it yields its trophies: a lovely anecdote about catching tiger trout with his sister; the unabashed first crush in his early teens that leads to a special fishing trip; his description of an old Canadian salmon guide as "a fiction of himself"; and passages like this:

Whitney and I bathed together early one morning in the wild Amonoosuc River.... The river was clear and cold, with big round boulders. Tiny brook trout, elusive as early love, darted at the foot of our naked bodies.

Your heart would have to be awfully hard to want to throw that one back. --Jeff Silverman

From the Back Cover

"When I dream," begins James Prosek in this wonderful book, "sometimes I can smell the resin on my pillow as if I were in the tent again . . .. I think of first kisses with a freckled girl, of abandoned New England farms, and limestone Civil War Homes on Pennsylvania spring creeks, and bright brook trout."The more than 200,000 readers who have bought Prosek's previous books will find in Early Love and Brook Trout his most poignant and revealing work. His memoir includes images of his first love, a girl named Whitney; his rowing days at Yale; his relationship to an old game warden named Joe Haines; and a night spent trapped in a cabin during a flood at the foot of the Smoky Mountains. Always, as is proper for the superb painter he is, his eye catches everything: the way a tree splits when struck by lightning, the way people interact at a salmon camp, the way wood smoke rises from a cabin on Lac St. Jean, and especially the colors of a spawning brook trout. Brook trout are at the center of his memories: They are his home fish, and he follows their range from Quebec to Georgia, fishing, painting specimens from various localities, documenting the immense diversity of this species.Graced with more than forty stunning watercolors by the author, Early Love and Brook Trout is a book no angler will want to miss. (8 1/4 X 8 1/4, 164 pages, watercolors)

About this edition

• Publisher: Lyons Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 158574039X
• ISBN 13: 9781585740390
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 143