From the highly acclaimed author of Ninety-two in the Shade and Cloudbursts comes a collection of alternately playful and exquisite essays—including seven collected here for the first time—borne of a lifetime spent fishing. "Thomas McGuane writes about fishing better than anyone else in the history of mankind." —Jim Harrison, New York Times bestselling author of Legends of the Fall The forty extraordinary pieces in The Longest Silence take the reader from the tarpon of Florida to the salmon of Iceland, from the bonefish of Mexico to the trout of Montana. They introduce characters as varied as a highly literate Canadian frontiersman and a devoutly Mormon river guide and address issues ranging from the esoteric art of tying flies to the enduring philosophy of a seventeenth-century angler to the trials of the aging fisherman. Both reverent and hilarious by turns, and infused with a deep experience of wildlife and the outdoors, The Longest Silence sets the heart pounding for a glimpse of moving water and demonstrates what dedication to sport reveals about life. "McGuane writes with wit, grit, and grace; the result is a book as entertaining as any you will find on any subject." — The Seattle Times "A wonderful writer at the top of his form." —David Halberstam "Entertaining as well as technical... he gentle, elegiac descriptions laced with crisp opinion ... draw the reader in." — The New York Times "His words are as fresh as the morning dew on an angler's line." — Chicago Sun-Times "Brilliantly written.... McGuane's most personal book." — Minneapolis StarTribune "Thomas McGuane writes about fishing better than anyone else in the history of mankind." — Jim Harrison "It's vintage McGuane, the prose elegant and erudite." — The Denver Post "A meaty book, and an uplifiting one, dazzlingly well-written.... As compelling a testimony to the power and mystery of obsession as I have ever read." —Tom Fort, Financial Times "Certain to entertain fellow enthusiasts and fans of his writing.... McGuane casts not only his fishing line, but also his magic at turning a precise phrase and evoking a delightful image." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) "An outlaw spirit moves through these fish stories.... Iconoclastic, unpredictable.... Audacious." — Kirkus Reviews "Readers will feel the strong, cold currents of fish-infested rivers at their legs." — Booklist THOMAS McGUANE lives on a ranch in McLeod, Montana. He is the author of ten novels, including the National Book Award-nominated Ninety-two in the Shade , three works of nonfiction, and four collections of stories . His work has won numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and has been anthologized in the Best American Stories , Best American Essays , and Best American Sporting Essays . Small Streams in Michigan The first fly rod I ever owned was eight feet of carpet beater made by a company whose cork grips were supplied by my father. My father worked for a Portuguese cork company whose owners swam at Estoril and supplied our family with innumerable objects of cork, including cork shoes, cork boxes, cork purses, and unidentified flying cork objects that my brother and I threw at each other. In our living room we had large cut-glass decanters of Burgundy, long soured, and my brother and I would have a couple of hits of that vinegar and head for the cellar to throw cork. Everyone in our family had a huge brown fly rod with a Portuguese cork handle and identical Pflueger Medalist reels of the size used for Atlantic salmon. As I look back, I am touched by my father's attempts to bring us to sport, en famille. I remember when he and my mother canoed the Pere Marquette in that early phase. Passing underneath the branches of streamside trees, my mother seized one of them in terror. The branch flexed; the canoe turned sideways in the current and began to go under. My father bellowed to let go of the branch. My mother did and the branch shot across the canoe like a longbow, taking my father across the chest and knocking him overboard. With his weight gone, one end of the canoe rose four feet out of the water and my mother twirled downstream until my father contrived to race along a footpath and make the rescue. When it was done, two rods with Portuguese cork grips were gone. The canoe was saved until the time my brother and I used it as a toboggan in snow-filled streambeds and beat the bottom out of it. At that time, we lived down on Lake Erie, where I conducted a mixed-bag sporting life, catching perch and rock bass on worms, some pike on Daredevils, some bass on a silver spoon. In the winter, I wandered around the lake on the ice and shot crows, a painful memory. But when we went up north with our Portuguese cork handle fly rods, I knew the trout were there. And so I spurned worms, owned a fly box, and espoused purist attitudes in the traditional b