Français
Here a few books coming up in our bookstores in France, some were published several years ago in the U.S, but not all of them ! I love to read first novels as well 😉 But let’s start with our dear Thomas 😉
The thirty-three essays in The Longest Silence take us from the tarpon of Florida to the salmon of Iceland, from the bonefish of Mexico to the trout of Montana. They bring us 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. Infused with a deep experience of wildlife and the outdoors, both reverent and hilarious by turns, The Longest Silence sets the heart pounding for a glimpse of moving water and demonstrates what dedication to sport reveals about life.
Passionate, meditative, personal, and often very funny, these essays are filled with fellowship and connected by his love of angling. The title piece, a certified classic in the sporting genre, chronicles his quest for the elusive permit.
McGuane weighs in with trophy prose: “What is emphatic in angling is made so by the long silences–the unproductive periods. For the ardent fisherman, progress is towards the kinds of fishing that are never productive in the sense of the blood riots of the hunting-and-fishing periodicals. Their illusions of continuous action evoke for him, finally, a condition of utter, mortuary boredom.”
You guys all know about that book already but it’s been published again in France and it’s always nice to see these books back on the shelves 😉
Brilliant, witty, perceptive essays about fly-fishing, the natural world, and life in general by the acknowledged master of fishing writers.
While most of us fly-fish to escape from daily life, for John Gierach and his friends fly-fishing IS a way of life. They are trout bums. But John Gierach is also an exceptional writer. The essays in Trout Bum are reflective, bitingly humorous and enormously wise in the ways of fishing and men. In vivid, unforgettable detail they recount the emotional, spiritual and tangible adventures and pleasures of stalking trout in and around the Rockies—day in, day out, from season to season, with friends and alone.
John Gierach’s essays join the literary tradition of angling classics like The River Why, and A River Runs Through It.
Same with that book from James Crumley – I’ve bought the old ones but it’s nice to get the new cover ! James Crumley‘s character C.W Sughrue is back (and Cyril loves it!).
Tough, hard-boiled, and brilliantly suspenseful, The Last Good Kiss is an unforgettable detective story starring C. W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator who kills time by working at a topless bar. Hired to track down a derelict author, he ends up on the trail of a girl missing in Haight-Ashbury for a decade. The tense hunt becomes obsessive as Sughrue takes a haunting journey through the underbelly of America’s sleaziest nightmares.
244 pages of pleasure ! Yes, there’s no fishing and lakes but the ride’s worth it ! and the guy is in Montana 😉  I do have to admit that, if I love American book covers of today (I just bought a dozen of them), these old ones are are actually pretty ugly !
If you haven’t read Homesman or The Shootist, please do or leave immediately this website ! Of course, I have to buy this classic fairy tale by Glendon Swarthout, Bless the beasts and children.
Six boys run away from a summer camp in Arizona seeking a way to prove that they are not failures and misfits by saving a penned buffalo herd from slaughter in a state-sponsored annual buffalo hunt. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction by its publisher, Doubleday, back in 1970 and filmed by Stanley Kramer in 1972 with a famous theme song by the Carpenters and a much re-used film score (“Nadia’s Theme” from the 1972 Olympics and the opening theme from the CBS TV soap opera, The Young and the Restless).
It’s a must read ! Even if you’re feeling a little bit too old for it 😉  Needless to say, I very much like the French cover but there’s an older version of that book available on Amazon which I like a lot.
This is my next read, I’ve ordered in the U.S before getting it (yes!) in French – I will read it in English because I do love the paperback edition. I can’t wait to talk you more about it !
Bill Reed manages a wildlife sanctuary in rural Idaho, caring for injured animals―raptors, a wolf, and his beloved bear, Majer, among them―that are unable to survive in the wild. Seemingly rid of his troubled past, Bill hopes to marry the local veterinarian and live a quiet life together, the promise of which is threatened when a childhood friend is released from prison. Suddenly forced to confront the secrets of his criminal youth, Bill battles fiercely to preserve the shelter that protects these wounded animals and to keep hidden his turbulent, even dangerous, history. Alternating between past and present, Christian Kiefer contrasts the wreckage of Bill’s crime-ridden years in Reno, Nevada, with the elusive promise of a peaceful future.
In finely sculpted prose imaginatively at odds with the harsh, volatile world Kiefer evokes, The Animals builds powerfully toward the revelation of Bill’s defining betrayal―and the drastic lengths Bill goes to in order to escape the consequences.
And yes, it’s a first novel and set in Idaho. You can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and your local bookstore, my favorite place in the world.
And at last, another first but in the short stories category. A young Canadian writer and the U.S cover is striking ! I can’t wait to read them 😉
A line-dancing aficionado visits his brother in jail in hopes of mending their relationship, and instead discovers his own unwitting role in his brother’s failed life. After the death of his wife and children, a logger tries to survive the Thanksgiving weekend on his own. A delinquent teen’s life is changed forever by a work-camp placement with a violent older boy. A truck driver seeks sanctuary from his abusive wife in a fantasy world of strip clubs and personal ads.
Bristling with restlessness and brutality, these linked stories set in the Pacific Northwest catapult readers into the gritty lives of social outcasts lost in purgatories of their own making. John Vigna tempers raw and at times cruel rural masculinity with graceful prose and breathtaking tenderness to illuminate the plight of men living in small towns and backwoods who belong neither to history nor the future. A startling homage to the great Southern Gothic tradition, Bull Head is a dazzling debut that heralds a powerful and exciting new literary voice.
John Vigna is an alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His fiction and non fiction have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines. John lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife, writer Nancy Lee.
This is it, but this selection does make you thirsty, right ?