A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing: Stories

by Tim Weed

Overview

A high mountain lake in the Colorado Rockies is the point of departure for these stories of dark adventure, in which vividly drawn landscapes provide an immersive setting for narratives about coming of age, altered states, moral slippage, romantic love, sexual jealousy, and impenetrable loneliness. Fishing guides, amateur sportsmen, teenage misfits, scientists, mountaineers, and expatriates embark on disquieting journeys of self-discovery in far-flung places: the hazardous tidal waters of Nantucket, the granite quarries and ski slopes of New Hampshire, Venezuela’s Orinoco basin, the ancient squares and alleyways of Rome and Granada, the summit of an Andean volcano, and the tension-filled streets of eastern Cuba. Classic in feel and fresh in approach, the stories in A FIELD GUIDE TO MURDER AND FLY FISHING speak to the inextricability of exterior and interior experience; to the powerful magnetism of solitude versus friendship, brotherhood, and love; and to the urgent need for a more direct engagement with the planet that sustains us.
 
A FIELD GUIDE TO MURDER AND FLY FISHING has been shortlisted for the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project, the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, and the Lewis-Clark Press Discovery Award. Stories in the collection have appeared in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Saranac Review, and many other literary magazines, reviews, and anthologies. “The Afternoon Client” won the 2013 Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards, and “Tower Eight” was the Grand Prize winner for Outrider Press’s The Mountain anthology. Other stories have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net anthologies and shortlisted for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, the Lightship International Literature Prize, the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, the Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Award, the Alligator Juniper Award for Short Fiction, and the Richard Yates Short Story Awards.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780998701202
Publisher:	Green Writers Press
Publication date:	03/22/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	959 KB

About the Author

Tim Weed teaches writing at Grub Street in Boston and in the MFA Writing program at Western Connecticut State University, and  works as a featured expert for National Geographic Expeditions and is the co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program. His first novel, Will Poole's Island (Namelos, 2014), was named one of Bank Street College of Education's Best Books of the Year. Read more at timweed.net.

Editorial Reviews

“Tim Weed’s A Field Guide to Murder and Fly Fishingis a fiction collection of the first order. I found myself parceling out the stories to make them last.These are stories that will live a long time both on the page and in your heart.”—Joseph Monninger, National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, author of Whipporwill and The World as We Know It.

“Each story is a jewel, cracking open what matters most: love, family, and our big beautiful planet.” —Ann Hood, author of The Obituary Writer and The Book That Matters Most

“In his first short story collection, novelist Tim Weed shows his stunningly impressive range—transporting readers from the heights of the Andes and the depths of the Amazon to the backstreets of Rome and Granada. Many of Weed’s stories have a hint of the mysterious, even the supernatural, but they are all grounded in sharply-rendered material worlds so fresh one feels one might step directly into the literary photographs he has created and stroll around for a while. A top-notch debut, not to be missed.”—Jacob Appel, author of Einstein’s Beach House

“From the mountain lakes of the Colorado Rockies to cobbled streets of Spain, this fascinating collection of short stories by Vermont-based writer Tim Weed (Will Poole’s Island) never disappoints. The stories are more about choices than they are about fly fishing or murder, but time and again Weed’s vivid characters in these thirteen tales of dark adventure are forced to confront a vision of themselves—or others—that’s not quite as positive as they’d hoped . . . A Field Guide to Murder and Fly Fishing is a collection you’ll be happy to get lost in.” Julie Reiff, Ploughshares

From the Publisher

"In the short-story collection A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing (Green Writers), Vermont author Tim Weed proves himself a skilled creator of a sense of place, whether he’s writing about New Hampshire, Nantucket, New England elsewheres, or Cuba, Colorado, or El Salvador. His characters, mostly men, mostly in a period of adulthood before middle age, wrestle with doubt, with themselves. In “Scrimshaw,” a Cape Cod carpenter with a penchant for scrimshaw flies every day to Nantucket to work on multimillion dollar mansions. Weed gives a narrow-eyed look at the island’s summer inhabitants, dripping wealth, and a carpenter’s sense of a jobsite, its Tyvek and pallets of shingles. Of one house there, he writes, “It was a sprawling, well-built place: tightly seamed trim, hardwood floors and cupboards, no cost cutting on materials or technique, even the invisible stuff that was obvious only to a carpenter.” A few stories drift into magical realism, and each story deposits one definitively into a geography, of mind and map."

Boston Globe