An Angler's Astoria

Published by Stackpole Books
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

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About The Book

A reflective, insightful, and enthusiastic collection of stories and essays about Hughes’ home waters on the Oregon coast, An Angler’s Astoria is an ode to familiar fishing.

A new epilogue complements and completes the original stories. The stories describe and define a time and a place: the fly-fishing adventures and misadventures that Hughes had growing up on the Oregon coast, and the lives, from tiny aquatic insects through trout, steelhead, and salmon, up to deer and elk, cougars and bears, and on to that most mischievous animal of all—humans—that he encountered while prowling his native rivers and streams, ponds, and lakes.

Universal and timeless, these stories apply not just to fly fishing but to many other aspects of living a life in any time, and in every place. The book became a quiet classic, and it’s as current and important today as it was the day it arrived. Both humble and humorous, it’s a delightful and informative read wherever in the world you might find your own adventures, with or without a fly rod in your hand.

About The Author

Product Details

  • Publisher: Stackpole Books (February 1, 2020)
  • Length: 240 pages
  • ISBN13: 9780811738880

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Raves and Reviews

Hughes' thesis seems to be that angling is a rare pleasure to be shared in print as well as enjoyed in person.

– Steve Raymond, Flyfisher

His views on conservation are especially refreshing with a depth of historical perspective and a clean line of reasoning that will grab your understanding first, then your emotions, unlike much of the standard rhetoric that omits that first step.

– John Gierach, author of Trout Bum

Like his more formal works, An Angler's Astoria contains many lessons, the kind you come by honestly, if you grow up fishing a place you learn to love--homewaters, or heartwaters as it were--and ultimately become an aquatic entomologist-cum-expert fly fisher.

– Seth Norman, California Fly Fisher

An Angler's Astoria is full of the youthful exuberance of its author and his Pacific Northwest. Among so many books of doleful reminiscence (written by young men), Hughes's stories are oases.

– Fly Fisherman

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