The River Why

Author	Edward Abbey
ISBN	0061129763

Ed Abbey called The Monkey Wrench Gang, his 1975 novel, a "comic extravaganza." Some readers have remarked that the book is more a comic book than a real novel, and it's true that reading this incendiary call to protect the American wilderness requires more than a little of the old willing suspension...

Author	Brian Doyle
ISBN	0870715852

Like Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood" and Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio, " Brian Doyle's stunning fiction debut brings a town to life through the jumbled lives and braided stories of its people. In a small fictional town on the Oregon coast there are love affairs and almost-love-affairs, mystery...

Author	Norman Maclean
ISBN	0226500667

Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth...

Author	Nelson Algren
ISBN	1583220089

Nelson Algren's devastating of that savage, subterranean world go gamblers, junkies, alcoholics, prostitutes, thieves, and degenerates remains unsurpassed as an authentic portrait of human depravity.

Only a master like Algren could create such a passionate and dramatic novel of so...

Author	Thomas McGuane
ISBN	0679752897

Tiring of the company of junkies and burn-outs, Thomas Skelton goes home to Key West to take up a more wholesome life. But things fester in America's utter South. And Skelton's plans to become a skiff guide in the shining blue subtropical waters place him on a collision course with Nichol Dance, who has...

Author	Jim Harrison
ISBN	0440530008

Their plans were conceived in a drunken excitement and resulted in more horror than any of them could have imagined.  There was the poet able to retreat into beatific reveries of superb fishing in cold, fast streams; the Vietnam vet consumed by uppers, downers and violence; and the girl who loved...

Author	Thomas McGuane
ISBN	0224061011

Thomas McGuane's obsession with fish has taken him from the river in his backyard to the holiest waters of the fly-fisher's world. As he travels the fish take him to many and various subjects ripe for random speculation: rods and reels, the classification of anglers according to the flies they prefer,...