The Fish's Eye

In The Fish's Eye: Essays about Angling and the Outdoors, Ian Frazier "A Great Storyteller" (Newsweek), and one of the "American Originals" (Washington Post Book World) explores his lifelong passion for fishing, fish, and the aquatic world.


He sees the angler's environment all around him-in New York's Grand Central Station, in the cement-lined pond of a city park, in a shimmering bonefish flat in the Florida keys, in the trout streams of the Rocky Mountains. He marvels at the fishing in the turbid Ohio River by downtown Cincinnati, where a good bait for catfish is half a White Castle french fry. The incidentals of the angling experience, the who and the where of it, interest him as much as what he catches and how.

The essays (including the famous profile of master angler Jim Deren, late proprietor of New York's tackle store, the Angler's Roost) contain sharply focused observations of the American outdoors, a place filled with human alterations and detritus that somehow remains defiantly unruined. Frazier's simple love of the sport lifts him to straight -ahead angling description that are among the best contemporary writing on the subject.


The Fish's Eye brings together twenty years of heartfelt, funny, and vivid essays on a timeless pursuit where so many mysteries, both human and natural, coincide.