****Named One of the New York Post's Best New Books to Read **FIRE IN THE STRAW is the witty and deeply felt memoir of Nick Lyons, a man with an intrepid desire to reinvent himself—which he does, over and over.Nick Lyons shape shifts from reluctant student and graduate of the Wharton School, to English Professor, to husband of a fiercely committed painter, to ghost writer, to famous fly fisherman and award-winning author, to father and the...

The Robert Traver Fly-Fishing Writing Award has been the most widely recognized international award for fly fishing stories in the English language for thirty years. The annual Traver Award is jointly administered by the John D. Voelker Foundation of Marquette, Michigan and the American Museum of Fly Fishing in Manchester, Vermont. As an anthology of twenty honored stories from 2008 to 2025, this volume includes many of the best voices in fly fishing over the past twenty years. Foreword is...

Hope is an interesting thing. Some think it’s foolish, often misplaced, and at rarer times devastating; but more agree that hope is an integral and beautiful part of life, something that implicitly makes us human. We’re always hoping for something—for change, for improvement, or to find peace of mind amid life’s bustling demands. These things are often the subjects of our deepest desires, those things that can bring us true happiness. Fortunately for all of us who count ourselves among the...

"An insightful and varied view of Kentucky's lush landscape. . . . [Will] appeal to hunters, anglers, environmentalists." — Kentucky MonthlyFrom the moment Daniel Boone first "gained the summit of a commanding ridge, and . . . beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below," generations of Kentuckians have developed rich and enduring relationships with the land that surrounds them. Of Woods & Waters: A Kentucky Outdoors Reader is filled with l...

Downstream: Reflections on Brook Trout, Fly Fishing, and the Waters of Appalachia is a mosaic combining nature writing, fly-fishing narrative, memoir, and philosophical and spiritual inquiry. Fly-fishing narratives and fragments of memoir provide the narrative arc for exploring relationships between humans and rivers, and the ways in which our attitudes and philosophies impact our practices and the waters we depend on for life. The authors guide their readers on a journey from Maine's Andr...

The Forgotten Shipwreck is the true story of the boat which sank the day after England won the World Cup. It spans so many facets, from a village numbed, with whole families wiped out, to angry exchanges in the House of Commons and law courts. There is intrigue, chicanery, deceit, incompetence and greed. It had far-reaching ramifications and yet, for all that, the Darlwyne tragedy lacked an ending.On Thursday 4 August 1966 the sea began to give up its dead. The relatives o...

“Spring Creek is everything a fishing book should be,” says Craig Nova. “It has the ability to convey the magic that always exists between somebody who loves fishing and a particular piece of water that endlessly lives up to its end of the bargain.” It has been called Lyons's masterpiece.The river is one of those rare places where the trout are as long as your arm but also exceedingly difficult to catch. Lyons explores its secrets and confronts its greatest challenges. At first he ...

The Diver’s Tale is an unvarnished account of real British diving, based on the author’s 40+ year experience. Britain is an island nation so, unsurprisingly, scuba diving is a popular British pastime enjoyed by some 50,000 keen participants and just as many of the armchair variety. A carefully-structured programme of training ensures that the British diver is well-prepared for the challenging conditions which may be encountered beneath our seas. Or does it? How many trainee divers were tau...

While fishing off Montauk Point one October evening, Peter Kaminsky watched in awe as the moon rose and thousands of striped bass exploded from the sea in a furious feeding frenzy. As he cast his fly into the writhing mass, Kaminsky felt a soul-to-soul connection with the world’s greatest wildlife migration: the annual parade of fish and whales, butterflies and birds past Montauk Point.For twenty-five years, Kaminsky’s daily chronicle of his month in one of fly fishing’s greatest y...

Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it-its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport.Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltw...

Bright Rivers chronicles the angling passions and frustrations of one of fly-fishing's greatest men of letters.A city dweller trapped in the complexities of modern life, Nick Lyons has always found solace in his pilgrimages to great rivers. It is there that he fishes for trout, and in Bright Rivers, Lyons recounts the sometimes moving, sometimes hilarious experiences of his expeditions to Delaware, Beaverkill, Madison, Big Hole, and Yellowstone rivers, sharing rem...

All fishermen who have fished for a lifetime have baskets of great stories and reminiscences about the sport they love. Nick Lyons’s new collection is chock-full of them. From fishing a small Catskill creek and catching a huge brook trout when he was barely out of infancy to long opening day treks during his teens, and then on to fishing in France, Iceland, Key West, Montana, and widely elsewhere, Nick has spent a lifetime on the water.Fishing Stories features tales about ...