The Fish's Eye - by Ian Frazier (Paperback)

About the Book

Frazier explores his lifelong passion for fishing, fish, and the aquatic world he sees all around him. Frazier's simple love of the sport lifts him to a straight-ahead angling description that's among the best contemporary writing on the subject.

Book Synopsis

In The Fish's Eye: Essays about Angling and the Outdoors, Ian Frazier "A Great Storyteller" (Newsweek), and one of the "American Originals" (Washington Post Book World) explores his lifelong passion for fishing, fish, and the aquatic world.

He sees the angler's environment all around him-in New York's Grand Central Station, in the cement-lined pond of a city park, in a shimmering bonefish flat in the Florida keys, in the trout streams of the Rocky Mountains. He marvels at the fishing in the turbid Ohio River by downtown Cincinnati, where a good bait for catfish is half a White Castle french fry. The incidentals of the angling experience, the who and the where of it, interest him as much as what he catches and how.

The essays (including the famous profile of master angler Jim Deren, late proprietor of New York's tackle store, the Angler's Roost) contain sharply focused observations of the American outdoors, a place filled with human alterations and detritus that somehow remains defiantly unruined. Frazier's simple love of the sport lifts him to straight -ahead angling description that are among the best contemporary writing on the subject.

The Fish's Eye brings together twenty years of heartfelt, funny, and vivid essays on a timeless pursuit where so many mysteries, both human and natural, coincide.

Review Quotes

"Extraordinary...Reading [Ian Frazier] one thinks of such American originals as John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, Edward Hoagland, Peter Matthiessen, and Evan S. Connell." --The Washington Post Book World

"Trust Ian Frazier to break new ground in the literature about fishing...his humor and imagination infuse the seventeen essays...with the manic enthusiasm few anglers can ever explain." --The New York Times Book Review

"[Frazier] is a keen observer and a genuine lover of nature. On every page is a description that brings the air, sky, water, rocks, flies, and fish stunningly, startlingly to life." --The Boston Globe

"The Fish's Eye deserves a place in every tackle box on every creek bank in America....A prodigious but casual genius... Frazier's also a whale of a reporter." --San Francisco Examiner

"Deliciously bent outdoor essays, most of which involve a fly rod." --Men's Journal

"It's hard to imagine a more heartfelt book, or one more lovingly rendered." --Booklist (starred review)

"[Frazier's] such an incredible writer that even readers who don't care much about fishing will find in The Fish's Eye a welcoming spot to sit and cast about pondering the depths of life." --Los Angeles Times

"Witty, insightful...This gem belongs in waterproof pockets and urban backpacks." --New York Post

"A great read...[He] is a kindred spirit whose writing has the warmth and humbleness of an old friend." --Big Sky Journal

About the Author

Ian Frazier is the author of Travels in Siberia, Great Plains, On the Rez, Lamentations of the Father and Coyote V. Acme, among other works, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He graduated from Harvard University. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.