Excerpt from Apparition & Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But that first time Danny remembered nothing so much as the slow tug of the lure in the current,the fresh sensation of the river’s bottom and the current’s ways as he worked it through snags, over gravel, around stumps, and into the dark pools where his father told him fish were waiting. And he remembered the first fierce hit oft he brown trout, how it rose in a fury and leapt and ran upstream, then downstream, taking line from the reel, and his father’s calm counsel behind him, “That’s it, Danny, that’s it,” and the beauty of it in the net and the mystery of it and the sense that he had of having been chosen by the fish because he had made the long trip in the dark, endured the cold, and the long walk through the swamp to stand in the right spot and cast to the right place, and listened to his father’s instructions and let the lure sink and work its way until it brought the eight-pound fish and the eight-year-old boy together.

Excerpted from Apparition & Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch. Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Lynch. Excerpted by permission of Norton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.