The Longest Silence

With ten books over a thirty-year span, Thomas McGuane has proven himself over and over again "a virtuoso . . . a writer of the first magnitude," as Jonathan Yardley wrote in the New York Times Book Review. "His sheer writing skill is nothing short of amazing." But he has devoted a couple decades more to another sustaining passion: the pursuit of most every sporting fish known to the angler's hopes and dreams.The quarry--from trout and salmon to striped bass, massive tarpon, and chimerical permit--inhabit these thirty-three essays as surely as the characters of a novel, luring the author back to childhood haunts in Michigan and Rhode Island, and on through the stages of his life in San Francisco, Key West, and Montana; from the river in his backyard to the holiest waters of the American fishery, and to such far-flung locales as Ireland, Argentina, New Zealand, and Russia. As he travels with friends, with his son, alone, or in the literary company of Roderick...