Boats: An Anthology

B $19.95 oats, whether used for sport or for livelihood, whether owned or simply borrowed, have always exerted a particular fascination for those who set foot on them. In Boats, David Seybold, editor of Seasons of the Angler, presents twenty-five stories and essays by some of today’s most prominent and talented writers, including Annie Dillard, Joseph McElroy, Peter Matthiessen, John Hersey, Rick Bass, Geoffrey Wolff, and Robert Silverberg, along with poems by Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver. Boats is an anthology devoted entirely to the many craft that sail the waters. Here are tales of icebreakers on Lake Michigan and freighters in Panama, of trawling in Alaska and sailing for the America’s Cup. Peter Matthiessen and Geoffrey Wolff recount the seductive dangers of nautical hubris. Rip Torn and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., tell how they came to build boats of their own. John N. Cole lovingly details a lifetime of boat collecting, while E. Annie Proulx humorously explores what happens when collection becomes obsession. For David Ewing Duncan, a boat is a place to heal; for Robert F. Jones, it is the setting for epiphany. Enormously varied, beautifully written, and thoroughly rewarding, Boats is an anthology for anyone who enjoys sailing, or who has ever dreamed of following the call to go “down to the sea in ships.”