A Twitch Upon the Thread: Writers on Fishing by Jon Day

The best fishing writing is never only about fishing, and the writers collected in this anthology use angling as a way to write about love, loss, faith, and obsession.

‘I first learned to fish around the time I learned to read, and I soon came to think of angling and reading as complementary activities. To read you had to learn the shape of letters and how they fit together; to fish you had to learn the knots and the names of rigs, as well as the behaviour of your quarry. Both fishing and reading provided access to imaginary worlds, worlds that were hidden from others. While sitting and watching your float, the water became a book, and to fish it well you had to learn to read it.’

Introduced by fisherman, writer, and ex-bicycle courier Jon Day, the selection includes contributions from Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Jerome K. Jerome, Arthur Ransome, George Orwell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jonathan Raban, and dozens more. Read it and be hooked.

Jon Day is a writer, academic and cyclist. He worked as a bicycle courier in London for several years, and is now a lecturer in English Literature at King’s College London. He writes for the London Review of Books, n+1, the New Statesman and others, and is a regular book critic for the Financial Times and the Telegraph. He is a contributing editor of the Junket, an online quarterly.