Thomas McGuane

"This is the story of the Whitelaws, a family whose values are as far-flung as the territory they helped settle, and whose most recent generations have pioneered the landscape of dysfunction.". "The patriarch, Sunny Jim, exerts his perverse control even posthumously, by means of a last will and testament that binds the family fortune (a bottling franchise) to a marriage that ought, by general assent, to be rent asunder. The charms of this particular son-in-law, lately released from prison, are potent if short-lived; Evelyn Whitelaw, his estranged wife, is quite literally bedeviled by them. And as her mother and sister court this twisted inheritance, her own yearnings point toward a way of life once habitual on these western plains but now embodied only by Bill Champion, the family's ranch foreman and Evelyn's one true compass."--BOOK JACKET.

"The quarry - from trout and salmon to striped bass, massive tarpon, and chimerical permit - inhabit these thirty-three essays as surely as the characters of a novel, luring the author back to childhood haunts in Michigan and Rhode Island, and on through the stages of his life in San Francisco, Key West, and Montana; from the river in his backyard to the holiest waters of the American fishery, and to such far-flung locales as Ireland, Argentina, New Zealand, and Russia. As he travels with friends, with his son, alone, or in the literary company of Roderick Haig-Brown or Isaak Walton, the fish take him to such subjects as "unfounded opinions" on rods and reels, the classification of anglers according to the flies they prefer, family, and memory - right down to why fishermen lie."--BOOK JACKET. "Infused with a deep experience of wildlife and the outdoors, dedicated to conservation, reverent and hilarious by turns or at once, The Longest Silence sets the heart pounding for a glimpse of moving water, and demonstrates what a life dedicated to sport reveals about life."--BOOK JACKET.

A young man courts disaster when he decides to compete with two established fishing guides in Key West.

American Wild: it can kill you, or exhilarate you. It's always there, a character in its own right in the great unfolding narrative of American writing. This issue of Granta is dedicated to stories of the wild, from MELINDA MOUSTAKIS on gutting fish in Alaska to CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS on a lost child in a dystopian California. Also: ANTHONY DOERR on a family of pioneers in Idaho, ADAM NICOLSON on tracking wolves in New Mexico and DAVID TREUER on cage fighting and his Ojibwe heritage.

"From one of our most acclaimed writers, a sumptuous gathering of his singular work in the short form, including seven new stories--nothing short of a literary event For more than four decades, Thomas McGuane has been heralded as an unrivaled master of the short story. Now the arc of that achievement appears in one definitive volume: thirty-eight stories drawn from his much-lauded previous collections, and another seven entirely new pieces appearing for the first time in book form. Set in the seedy corners of Key West, the remote shore towns of the Bahamas, and McGuane's hallmark Big Sky country, with its vast and unforgiving landscape, these are stories of people on the fringes of society, whose twisted pasts meddle with their chances for companionship. Moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again, McGuane writes about familial dysfunction, emotional failure, and American loneliness, celebrating the human ability to persist through life's absurdities"--

Struggling to find meaning in a sordid and humiliating youth from which he emerged a doctor through the help of a surrogate father figure, Berl Pickett is charged with negligent homicide in the death of a former lover before finding strength in the human connections he made throughout the years. By the author of Gallatin Canyon.