Brook Trout and the Writing Life

by Craig Nova, Ann Beattie (Introduction)

Overview

Joy, fear, love, children, fishing, friends, a woman who is a partner, a house in the country, and, of course, the constant writing of books are some of the elements of this wonderful life. Author Craig Nova started Brook Trout and the Writing Life as a letter to his children, but it soon became a credo, a belief in the way an American novelist can live in the modern age. The central question, answered here in a series of stories, is how one family, facing difficulty, both personal and literary, can live with pleasure, satisfaction, and the right amount of humility. In Brook Trout and the Writing Life the personal and the literary are often inextricably intertwined. It is a drama of what goes on just beyond the surface of the writing life.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012375667
Publisher:	Eno Publishers
Publication date:	03/31/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	89 KB

About the Author

Craig Nova is the award-winning author of twelve novels , including The Good Son, Cruisers, The Congressman’s Daughter, Trombone, and most recently, The Informer. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Men’s Journal, among other publications. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005 he was named Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Editorial Reviews

Craig Nova's sensitive and vivid memoir . . . records events—but he's casting for a larger catch: what swims at mysterious depths. His brilliant prose spars with experience, pulling in the line closer and closer to the quick of life. When a salmon takes the fly with a "tock" sound, Nova muses that the sound is like "knocking a knuckle against a violin" or "knocking on the coffin one will occupy one day." Such metaphoric associations free the prose to absorb levels and levels of connection

Frances Mayes

This is an unusual fishing book, in that it isn't about fishing for trophies or food or enlightenment, and unusual, too, in its quiet elegance. In Mr. Nova's hands, fishing reveals a life in which fishing connects the parts . . . a means of getting at qualities of the natural world that consciousness grasps but can't quite express. . . . A short book that gives long, lingering pleasure.

Tracy Kidder