Author Mark Kurlansky Discusses “The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing”

Join us for an evening with Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod and Salt, as he discusses his new nonfiction work, The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing. He’ll be joined by beloved bookseller Jon Grand, himself an avid fisherman. This online event is free.

About the Book: Fly fishing, historian Mark Kurlansky has found, is a battle of wits, and the fly fisher does not always (or often) win. The targets–salmon, trout, and char–are highly intelligent, wily, strong, and athletic animals. The allure, Kurlansky finds, is that fly fishing makes catching a fish as difficult as possible. There is an art, too, in the crafting of flies. Beautiful and intricate, some are made with more than two dozen pieces of feather and fur from exotic animals. The cast is a matter of grace and rhythm, with different casts and rods yielding varying results. Kurlansky is known for his deep dives into the history of specific subjects, from cod to oysters to milk. But he spent his boyhood days on the shore of a shallow pond. Here, where tiny fish weaved under a rocky waterfall, he first tied string to a branch, dangled a worm into the water, and unleashed his passion for fishing. Since then, a lifelong love of the sport has led him around the world–from the wilds of Alaska to Basque country, from the Catskills in New York to Oregon’s Columbia River, from Ireland and Norway to Russia and Japan. And he absorbed every fact, detail, and anecdote along the way. The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing combines history, craft, and personal memoir to show readers, devotees of the sport or not, the necessity of experiencing nature’s balm first-hand.

“This being a book by Kurlansky, who never met a fact he didn’t like, the narrative turns from his experiences as a fisherman to a more universal history. . . . Stuffed full of trivia, data, lore, and anecdote-a pleasure for any fan of trout fishing.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About the Author: Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling author of Milk!, Havana, Paper, The Big Oyster, 1968, Salt, The Basque History of the World, Cod, and Salmon, among other titles. He has received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Bon Appetit’s Food Writer of the Year Award, the James Beard Award, and the Glenfiddich Award. He lives in New York City.