The Fly Fisher's Reader

From Simon & Schuster, Fly Fisher's Reader is an unabashedly biased sampling angling's finest literature by Leonard M. Wright.

In Fly Fisher's Reader, Wright shares more than two dozen literary gems from amazing writers like Sparse Grey Hackle, Red Smith, Sir Edward Grey, Ernest Hemingway, Bill Barich, Tom McGuane, and others.

Anglers will jump at Wright's ( First Cast ) bait: 27 stories, articles and excerpts from books published over the last century, all about fishing. Sports columnist Red Smith describes Rocky Weinstein, an intrepid Everglades fisherman who "casts for six-foot alligators with a seven-and-a-half-foot fly rod"; Smith has no idea how Weinstein gets the hook out of the alligator. Theodore Gordon, "father of American dry-fly fishing," writes in 1903 of his own difficulty landing a particular three-pound trout (had it eluded him, "it would have been remembered as that four- or five-pound trout that got away"). Novelist Thomas McGuane, savoring "the long silences" of his sport, recounts a delightful episode in which a stingray futilely attempts to hide the crab it has found from a permit (a fish similar to a pompano): the permit nips at the stingray to drive it off the crab while McGuane lies in wait, hoping to catch the permit.
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