Acclaimed sporting and adventure writer Charles Gaines has spent much of his life on the water, around the world, fishing rod in hand, angling for trout, redfish, salmon, bonefish, bass, marlin, tuna, and practically everything else that swims. Just about any place where there's water to fish and eccentrics to keep him company, Gaines has been. The Next Valley Over, a collection of his best writing on fishing from his long and storied career, is culled from the pages of Men's Journal, Forbes, and Sports Afield, among other publications, and ultimately is about the heart of the sport. While his stories are lined with the accoutrement of angling--the art of technique, the equipment, the lodges, the fish themselves--they're really about why we love to fish and what it means to our culture. As Thoreau once said: "Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." What "they are after" is what Charles is curious about, and he has devoted the better part of his life and sanity to coming up with answers. Starting and ending at the majestic Lake Tadpole in St. Clair County, Alabama, where Gaines's love of fishing was initially sparked, the Next Valley Over chronicles exploits in exotic locations with eccentric characters. In the process of his quest of nearly every species known to man, Gaines explores what we are really searching for when we fish.

"Wyoming" ("The Lost Poems") is a run of poems written and put away in the 1970s. It is the work of a writer who began as a student of poetry but who became a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. None of the poems have been published previously or submitted anywhere for publication.
It is a collection of exploding imagination and acute observation. Love, sex, betrayal, redemption . . . tossed like dice on uniquely American landscapes. With the first poem you wonder where Terry McDonell has been; by the last you are shocked by his answers.