Upriver and Downstream: The Best Fly-Fishing and Angling Adventures from the New York Times

by The New York Times, Stephen Sautner, Glenn Wolff (Illustrator)

Upriver and Downstream gathers seventy columns about fishing—from freshwater to saltwater, from small ponds to the Great Lakes, from the Pacific Northwest to post-Soviet Russia—written for the “Outdoors” column of the New York Times.

Contributors include such celebrated names as Nick Lyons, Thomas McGuane, Nelson Bryant, Peter Kaminsky, Ernest Schweibert, and Robert H. Boyle. Short, evocative, informative, and entertaining, here are pieces about fly-fishing for wild brook trout, bait-fishing for striped bass, casting into tailwaters, or angling in midwinter. The settings range from Hudson River piers to the Florida Everglades, from Iceland to the Amazon, and the fish include everything from the common sunfish to the esoteric paddlefish. These engaging essays remind us of what fishing is all about: companionship and solitude, challenge and relaxation, nature and technology, from coast-to-coast to around the globe.

Rich with the particulars of water, light, and air, as well as a keen awareness of, as Verlyn Klinkenborg puts it in his introduction, “what is happening out there—in the deep, in the shallows, at the end of the line,” these reflections and recollections beautifully capture the natural world and one of life’s most challenging, perennial pursuits.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published April 3, 2007

About the author

The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed internationally. Founded in 1851, the newspaper has won 112 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization. Its website receives 30 million unique visitors per month.

Reviews

[Bradley Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The wonderful little stories that comprise Upriver & Downstream remind us why it is that we return to the river time and time again. No matter whether it's to reconnect with an old friend, cast on a familiar home-water, or seek a new adventure, the draw to the river with pole in hand is for a single reason hidden beneath layers of meaning-- to catch fish.

The book is split between different types of water and the fish they hold: from mountain trout streams to striped bass on tidal flats, Long Island to grand old England, and everything in between. Given their humble origins in the page of a newspaper the stories are short and direct, but filled with a fishermen's cleverness and appreciation of irony along with helpful tidbits of fishing lore. I implore you to read those stories beyond the waters you typically fish. I suspect you'll find familiar the appreciation for the naked beauty of fishing on a stormy sea and the stubborn passion that pushes a fisherman to cast in the dead of night for fish that likely are not there to be caught. As is so often the case, it's the fishing not the catching that draws us to the water. You'll discover through these tales that we're all kindred spirits on the water no matter our quarry, method, or location. Read on and I wish you the best with the book and the fishing!

[Ned · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of the NYT's best writing about fishing. I read a piece or two each night until I was done. I love fishing, and the writing was great, so this book was a sort of lullaby for me. I also learned more about fishing, and the one thing about fishing is that you never know enough.