A Twitch Upon the Thread: Writers on Fishing

The best fishing writing is never really about fishing, or never only about fishing, and the writers collected in A Twitch Upon the Thread use angling as a way to write about love, loss, faith, and obsession. This is an anthology of fishing writing ranging from medieval times to the present, taking the reader from riverbank to open ocean, from England to New Zealand, from the shore to the depths. Read it and be hooked. Included are contributions from Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Ota Pavel, Arthur Ransome, George Orwell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop, and dozens more.

Jon Day is a writer, critic, cyclist, and fisherman. He teaches English at King’s College London, and has written essays and reviews for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and many others. He is a regular book critic for the Guardian and the Financial Times, and writes about art for Apollo. His first book, Cyclogeography, was published by Notting Hill Editions in 2015. Homing was published by John Murray in 2019. He was a 2018 Man Booker Prize for Fiction judge.