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Season
of the Gar
Adventures in Pursuit of America’s Most Misunderstood
Fish
Mark Spitzer
The first book on a fish so
ugly only a mother could love it
Check
out the video trailer for the book!
“I love Mark Spitzer’s passion and energy for
gars and, just as important, for the pursuit of gars. Like
the novelist and poet he is, Spitzer brings empathy, humor,
and deep imagination to a type of writing usually mired in
the merely factual. Mark Spitzer had worked hard at his craft
daily for twenty years and it shows in every sentence. There
is a wildness here—in both fish and man. . . . Thanks
to this we can read Season of the Gar and have our lives lifted.”
—David Gessner, author of Soaring
with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from
Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond
“The prehistoric gar, a fish sometimes mistaken for
Nessie, has found its chronicler in Mark Spitzer. This is
a work of history, adventure, and philosophy, as suspenseful
a tale as any fictional thriller, yet amazingly true and thought
provoking. Don’t be surprised if this book starts a
gar-craze!”
—Andrei Codrescu, NPR commentator and
author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin
Play Chess
“Bravo to Mark Spitzer! He dives headlong into the roiling,
snake-infested realm of the gar and exposes ugly truths about
the long campaign to rid the earth of these fearsome yet fascinating
fishes. By debunking myths about gar, he does for them what
Barry Lopez and Rick Bass have done for wolves. . . . Season
of the Gar is the best compendium of gar information
ever put together. More importantly, it is an emotional essay
about one man’s enthusiastic inquiry into the proper
relationship between man and nature. It’s destined to
become a classic in outdoor literature.”
—Keith Sutton, author of Fishing
Arkansas and Pro Tactics: Catfish
Season of the Gar is a fang-infested, monster-headed,
armor-plated romp through the prehistoric swamps and murky
rivers of America’s most feared and demonized fish.
Follow Mark Spitzer on his lengthy and often frustrating quest
from Texas and Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas to catch
his own gar. Read about his sometimes bizarre angling adventures
in search of this air-breathing freshwater giant (up to ten
feet in length and well over three hundred pounds) as he separates
fact from fiction. Spitzer draws on folklore, science, history,
his own pet gar, and even gar recipes to tell this unique
and exciting literary eco-tale about a fish that has inspired
imaginations for centuries, a fish many have hated, a fish
many have thrown on the shore to die.
Mark Spitzer
is assistant professor of writing at the University of Central
Arkansas, managing editor of the Exquisite Corpse Annual,
and a lifelong, passionate fisherman. He’s the author
of a number of novels, story
collections, poetry, and translations, and a past resident
of Paris’s famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore.
He was a recent guest and gar guide on a television episode
of Animal Planet’s River Monsters.
April
6 x 9, 200 pages, 17 photographs
$19.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-929-2
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