Tim Weed

A high altitude lake is the point of departure for these stories of dark adventure, in which fishing guides, amateur sportsmen, teenage misfits, scientists, mountaineers, and expatriates embark on disquieting journeys of self-discovery in far-flung places.

Order the paperback, ebook, or audiobook at your favorite independent bookstore, Bookshop.org, IndieBound, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Audible.

“From the mountain lakes of the Colorado Rockies to cobbled streets of Spain, this fascinating collection of short stories never disappoints. A Field Guide to Murder and Fly Fishing is a collection you’ll be happy to get lost in.” — Ploughshares.

“I found myself consuming [these] thirteen tightly wound tales with addictive delight.” — Fiction Writers Review

“Tim Weed proves himself a skilled creator of a sense of place . . . each story deposits one definitively into a geography, of mind and map.” — The Boston Globe

Click here to listen to Tim’s April 2017 interview with Vermont Public Radio.

“These stories bristle with energy and immediacy. The writing is spare and meticulous and packs a hefty emotional punch. I am not exaggerating when I say this collection kept me up at nights. I just couldn’t stop reading.” — Addison Independent

“Provocative and memorable, this collection strikes all the right chords.” — Main Street Rag

“Weed’s short stories draw us away from the blue light of device screens. Under the blue skies and dark waters of A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, readers can feel pain, empathy, and purpose bubbling out from the sharp-detailed mental images.” — Pleiades

Click here to listen to Tim’s August 2017 interview with New Hampshire Public Radio.

“Weed’s stories . . . are colored by his long experience as a travel and adventure writer . . . His characters are fishermen, mountaineers, and teenagers all on a quest for self-discovery. From the title page to the last page, this is a book of gems.” — Big Sky Journal

“If you seek a guide—on coming of age, lost love, temptations both resisted and surrendered to, and the need to both engage with and respect the planet—Weed’s book is a good choice. It won’t tell you which laws to obey and which to break—but it will show you, with simultaneous beauty and savagery, what will happen either way.” —  Colorado Review 

A FIELD GUIDE TO MURDER & FLY FISHING made the Eric Hoffer Book Awards Grand Prize Short List and was a finalist in the short story category for both the American Fiction Awards and the International Book Awards. Earlier versions were shortlisted for the New Rivers Press Many Voices Project, the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, and the Lewis-Clark Press Discovery Award. 

“Steal Your Face” is a short story that would make Mark Twain proud, as if Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn found themselves on tour with Jerry and the boys and culminated their eventful summers on a head full of acid in Colorado at the Red Rocks amphitheater.” — Vagabondage Press

“The Money Pill” feels like essential literature—for its self-awareness, its bold impeachment of globalism, and its sultry, sticky atmosphere of arousal and shame.” —  Necessary Fiction

“Tim Weed’s A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing is a fiction collection of the first order. I found myself parceling out the stories to make them last. These are stories that will live a long time both on the page and in your heart.” —Joseph Monninger, author of The World as We Know It.

“Each story is a jewel, cracking open what matters most: love, family, and our big beautiful planet.” —Ann Hood, author of The Book That Matters Most

Stories in the collection have appeared in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Saranac Review, and many other literary magazines, reviews, and anthologies. “The Afternoon Client” won the 2013 Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards, and “Tower Eight” was the Grand Prize winner for Outrider Press’s The Mountain anthology. Other stories have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net anthologies and shortlisted for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, the Lightship International Literature Prize, the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, the Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Award, the Alligator Juniper Award for Short Fiction, and the Richard Yates Short Story Awards.

Order the collection at your favorite local bookstore (ISBN #978-0997452877) or on IndieBound, Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Or, click on the button below to add to your Goodreads to-read list (click the button, then click “Want to Read” under the cover image):

“This collection of stories by Tim Weed is grounded in the specificity of its settings, all of which contain hazards of one kind or another: a mountain lake, a jungle peak, an Amazonian river, a prairie giving way to construction, a seashore suddenly overcome by the tide, a city stuck in the past, a snowy slope (or two). But it is also full of mystery, and much of the mystery is cosmic . . . It is written so deftly, with such a light touch, that suspense builds in each story like a gathering storm.” — Patrick Joyce, Midwest Book Review

“Weed begins with the assumption that his readers are ready and able to see that the world is not as it seems. Humans and their sometimes mysterious natures are all it takes for Weed to spin fiction of the first order.” — The Brattleboro Reformer

“Like other talented writers in this genre, Weed is not hampered by the brevity of the medium . . . His denouements are unpredictable and sometimes even merely hinted at, leaving the reader to fall back on his or her own imagination as to how the tale ends, which sounds frustrating but is actually quite a tantalizing device.” — Trout Fisherman (UK)

“[In “Tower Eight”] Weed delves into adolescent friendship and the idea of being an outsider with great care for his characters. The tale begins and ends with one character musing on the reality of the other. The surreal ploy is subtle enough to bring the story into the realm of good literature, making the reader question perceptions of reality . . . Weed’s prose is weightless, and weighty, all at once.” — Seven Days

Order the paperback, ebook, or audiobook at your favorite independent bookstore, Bookshop.org, IndieBound, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Audible.