The Fish's Eye
Essays About Angling and the Outdoors
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
All 17 of the angling pieces Frazier (On the Rez) has written over the last 20 years have now been preserved in one volume. Attentive readers of the New Yorker over the last two decades will have caught most of these pieces before, but anglers and essay fans (not to mention Frazier devotees) should be glad to revisit gems like "An Angler at Heart," his 1981 profile of a Manhattan tackle dealer. Frazier's sharp eye and self-implicating wit is at work in these charming but unsentimental pieces, whether he's describing his penchant for mayflies in "It's Hard to Eat Just One," a family fishing trip in which his kids prefer a drainage ditch to the trout stream in "A Lovely Sort of Lower Purpose," or a Central Park pond where the fishermen are as likely to catch empty potato chip bags as catfish in "Anglers." Many of these essays are, in fact, about fishing in the city, and Frazier often wrings more suspense and meaning from a muddy stream that runs "From Wilderness to Wal-Mart" than some outdoor adventure writers get from an expedition through Nepal. His paeans to the angling experience set the standard in this subgenre, yet will amuse many who've never set foot in a tackle shop.
