Gather at the River: 25 Authors on Fishing

Novelists Joy (The Line That Held Us) and Rickstad (What Remains of Her) have pulled off the feat of assembling a fishing anthology that even non-anglers can enjoy, featuring essays from various writers that pay tribute to the beauty, peacefulness, and, sometimes, humor that accompany this pursuit. Novelist and memoirist Jim Minick, for one, describes fishing for suckers, the fish that feed on lake bottoms and are generally considered inedible, as a metaphor for his attitude toward life: “in suckerhood, not all is bad; I’m a sucker for the nip and run of dogs at play.” Novelist Jill McCorkle fondly recalls a summer on a beach in North Carolina and the new perspective it gave her on for her father, a surf fishing devotee. Novelist Ron Rash dreamily reflects on how finding and returning to a special place of one’s own—in his case, a gorge hidden off the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina—produces happiness. Joy, in his own essay, reflects that “all I know of beauty I learned with a fishing rod in my hand,” a sentiment which aptly sums up this meditative, lyrical collection as a whole. (May)