Brook Trout and the Writing Life: The Intermingling of Fishing and Writing in a Novelist's Life
"Craig Nova, one of the most distinctive voices and visionaries in American fiction, works close to the bone, but never forgets to see things from afar." --Ann Beattie"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.Brook Trout, over and over, takes youtherewhere elusive and slippery meaning might almost arc into the net." --Francis 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