The Pacific Northwest is fishing country, distinguished and defined by rivers, streams, lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, and an ocean. And where there's fishing, there is bound to be writing about fishing because, as Thomas McGuane observed, "you can't say enough about it."
Here's a book for people who can't read enough about it either. Fishing the Northwest collects stories and essays by twenty-two of the best angling writers in the region. Veteran flyfisher Glen Love has combed the vast literature on angling to create an exciting blend of subjects and styles that puts readers in the water next to fishing writers of great renown as well as noteworthy newer voices.
Included are celebrated early writers like Zane Grey, who made the Rogue and Umpqua rivers world famous, and Roderick Haig-Brown, who defined angling literature for the region. Also spotlighted is a new wave of excellent writing that has exploded in the Northwest over the past two decades, represented by a host of gifted authors like Ted Leeson and Jessica Maxwell -- one of several women who prove that it's no longer just a man's preserve.
The book ranges from Alaska to the Rogue River in southern Oregon, the Olympic Mountains and Vancouver Island to the Continental Divide in Montana. From the advice of angling eminence Enos Bradner to the spirited fiction of Ken Kesey, from Robin Carey's account of learning a new river to Lorian Hemingway's first flyfishing adventure, Fishing the Northwest is the ultimate book for anyone who, in Norman Maclean's famous words, is "haunted by waters."
