Norman MacLean

In the Montana wilderness a father teaches his two sons important life lessons while trout fishing.

River Runs Through It and Other Stories

Norman  Maclean

A River Runs Through it and Other Stories

I am haunted by waters… woof what an ending. The prose is like a fiction John McPhee, plain and unadorned and somehow utterly striking even shocking. You gasp when a sentence takes a left turn into a brick wall. The story is lovely, the mute Montana men are both very funny and very pinched. Ultimately about the profond unknowability of those closest to us, and how to live with that. 

Andrew

Norman Maclean

The narrator and his brother become fascinated with fly fishing and the Big Blackfoot River

A River Runs Through It

Fraser Simons

A masterpiece, imo. Riveting and insightful. Gorgeous prose and structure. A favourite.

A river runs through it is by far the star of the show. The other stories are fine but much less interesting, whereas the former is a masterpiece, in my opinion.

Nick Chmura

"Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart -- I don't know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep."

Nat Welch

A really good book. I had hoped for a little better writing, but it shines through in many sections.

Paige Wanner

Le Hoang Anh Tu

Gabe Cortez

When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Forty years later, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs through It has established itself as a classic of the American West. This new edition will introduce a fresh audience to Maclean’s beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Elegantly redesigned, A River Runs through It includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award-winning 1992 film adaptation of River. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.”

River Runs Through It and Other Stories

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