Gather at the River: Twenty-Five Authors on Fishing

by David Joy, Eric Rickstad

Overview

Contributors include New York Times Bestselling Authors Ace Atkins, Ron Rash, Jill McCorkle, Leigh Ann Henion, Eric Rickstad, M.O. Walsh, and #1 Bestseller C.J. Box. The Cherokee have a ceremony of going to water. Once a month on a night governed by the moon, they go to the river in an act of renewal and reverie. Much like baptism, it is the belief that there is a healing power to water, a sentiment shared by every soul that’s ever stood waist-deep in a river watching trout rise. Gather At The River isn’t a collection of big fish stories. This is PEN/Faulkner Finalist Ron Rash writing about a 50-year-old fly reel. It’s #1 New York Times Bestselling Author CJ Box explaining where he wants his ashes spread when he dies. This is an anthology about friendship, family, love and loss, and everything in between, because as Henry David Thoreau wrote, “it is not really the fish they are after.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938235535
Publisher:	Hub City Press
Publication date:	05/07/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

David Joy is the author of the Edgar nominated novel Where All Light Tends to Go, as well as the novels The Weight Of This World and The Line That Held Us. He is also the author of the memoir Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman's Journey, which was a finalist for the Reed Environmental Writing Award and the Ragan Old North State Award. Joy is the recipient of an artist fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council. His latest short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Garden & Gun, and The Bitter Southerner. Joy lives in the North Carolina mountains.

Eric Rickstad is the New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of the Canaan Crime Series novels, which includes THE NAMES OF DEAD GIRLS, THE SILENT GIRLS, and LIE IN WAIT. These dark, psychological page-turners, set in remote northern Vermont, are heralded as masterful, disturbing, profound and heartbreaking. Rickstad’s first novel, REAP, was a New York Times Noteworthy Novel. His latest novel WHAT REMAINS OF HER will be published July 24, 2018. Rickstad lives in Vermont with his wife, son, and daughter, and writes all his first drafts with a pencil in notebooks, often outside in the Vermont woods.

Table of Contents

Introduction, by David Joy Gould’s Inlet , Taylor Brown Lullaby, J.C. Sasser Fishing Lessons, Ron Rash In Lightning Past, M.O. Walsh Lobstering with Griff, Ingrid Thoft The Mullet Girls, jill McCorkle The Simple Angle(r), Erik Storey Dream Fishing, Drew Lanham Paducah ’80, J. Todd Scott Some Crazy Sh*t, Frank Bill A Dream of Trout, Eric Rickstad For My Father, William Boyle The Wooly Bugger Talk, Scott Gould The Year of the Mackeral, Mark Powell Frogging Quintana, Natalie Baszile Truth or Consequences: The One That Didn’t Get Away, Michael Farris Smith Bait, Chris Offutt Shark Bait, Leigh Ann Henion Fishing Lessons: An Essay in Two Acts, Gabino Iglesias Past the Banks, Ray McManus Sucker, Jim Minick The Encampment: The Hotter, Younger Sister, C.J. Box Temporal, Todd Davis Some Thoughts on Marriage Before I Wed, Rebecca Gayle Howell Memory of Water, Silas House

Editorial Reviews

01/28/2019

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)

Publishers Weekly

"Come for the fish stories, but stay for the writing—it sparkles like the flank of a mullet, thumps like the tail of a bull redfish, and leaps off the page like a tarpon." -—David DiBenedetto, Editor in Chief, Garden & Gun Magazine

From the Publisher

2019-02-04

A gathering of writers expound on their love for fishing.

Editors Joy (The Line that Held Us, 2018, etc.) and Rickstad (The Names of Dead Girls, 2017, etc.) invited 25 authors to contribute pieces about their love of fishing (four were previously published). In his introduction, Joy writes, "all I know of beauty I learned with a fishing rod in my hand." These delightful and sprightly essays are "about friendship, family, love and loss, and everything in between." Throughout the anthology, nature and nostalgia run deep, as the contributors reflect on when they fell in love with the sport while fishing with relatives, friends, or alone. Ron Rash writes about fishing in North Carolina's Goshen Creek as a 14-year-old boy and almost snagging the "biggest fish of his life." Jill McCorkle, who loved fishing with her father, was proud to be the "daughter who could touch anything stinky and slimy without flinching." As J. Todd Scott writes, "angling for catfish" with night crawlers and mealworms "isn't hard. They're always hungry and not particularly canny." Ray McManus confesses that "much of what I understand about writing was shaped from fishing." He can work as hard as he can and "still end up with an empty hook." Some writers discuss fly-fishing. Scott Gould recalls his father casting "gorgeous giant perfect loops spooling off the water." Near Georgia's Saint Simon's Island, Taylor Brown fearfully recounts hooking a shark in the surf. There are lovely pieces about Massachusetts lobstering and night swimming in the Great Barrier Reef when the "coral release trillions of eggs and sperm sacs simultaneously." Natalie Baszile loved frogging in the Louisiana "bayou-dark—which is more like the darkness of deep space." As Silas House reminds us, "fishing stories are among the best kind." Other contributors include C.J. Box, Jim Minick, and Rebecca Gayle Howell.

Anglers of all stripes will relish these delectable morsels of love.

Kirkus Reviews