Set against the remote wilderness of Alaska, The Radical Radiance of the Fishing Fly by Lewis K. Schrager unfolds as a story of dislocation and emotional reckoning, where unfamiliar landscapes mirror a man’s internal struggle to reconcile reason with forces he cannot control.

A carefully ordered life begins to unravel when certainty can no longer be relied upon. As a medical researcher, David Nichols trusts logic and evidence, values that are challenged when his brother Larry faces cancer. Throughout treatment, Larry finds solace in tying fishing flies and imagining distant waters, using creativity to endure uncertainty and pain.

Once Larry survives, he invites David on a fishing expedition that exposes long-suppressed emotional fault lines. Among a group driven by passion rather than restraint, David struggles to connect. Old wounds between the brothers resurface, shaped by fear, responsibility, and years of unspoken tension. David also finds himself drawn to Kathy Sands, a member of the fishing party burdened by her own losses, whose presence complicates his emotional detachment.

The experience culminates in a covert nighttime excursion driven by revenge. In that pivotal moment, David must confront the fragile boundary between reason and emotional commitment, reshaping his understanding of risk and connection.

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Excerpt

I pulled out of the underground garage onto Wisconsin Avenue, then down the ramp heading east on the Washington Beltway. Rays of the rising sun glowed orange in a far-off bank of clouds. Gray banks of night fog, exhaled from dying creeks and streams entrapped within the urban sprawl, drifted over the roadway bridges before dissipating as rising haze over the slim remains of vestigial marshland. I turned onto I-95 North, speeding past countless semis parked close along the shoulders of the highway, red running lights blinking crazy in the half-light. I imagined the truckers awakening in their dark, coffin-like spaces, yawning and stretching and rubbing their eyes as they plan for another day bringing who-knows-what to who-knows-where.

Wondering where I was going.

Wondering why.

In fact, I knew. My destination on that steamy August morning was the Philadelphia airport, a rendezvous with my older brother Larry. In less than three hours I would be meeting him there. We would board our plane to Seattle, and then another to Anchorage, and then a third and a fourth, our destination somewhere in the Alaskan wilderness for a week of fly fishing.

The first rays of the freshly risen sun flared above the distant cloudbank. I squinted against the blinding glare, lowered my sun visor, fumbled with my sunglasses, and slipped them on.

This was a bad idea.

I was nervous about spending this much time with Larry. Growing up, he was brash and loud, determined to be the center of attention. I was quiet, more than happy to disappear into the background, unnoticed and undisturbed. This worked out fine when we were apart. On the few occasions where we found ourselves thrown together, like at an occasional high school party, he’d notice my subtle signals of embarrassment at his behavior and would talk more loudly, act more wildly, dance more crazily, until I shrunk away into a kind of nothingness and headed home on my own. I could never even think of taking him on physically when he pushed me past my breaking point as he was taller and far stronger than I, and a champion wrestler as well.

I tried to convince myself that this fishing trip would work out fine. So much had changed since our high school days. Larry had become a successful businessman, having grown Leather and More, our father’s store in South Philly to three times its original size. He’d expanded the business, establishing a second store in the Mall at Short Hills, a prime shopping destination in the tony New Jersey suburbs just west of New York City. He’d married Tina Simons, a wonderful woman who gave him a couple of lovely daughters. He’d mellowed.

Besides, I realized that all this cogitation was irrelevant. Mellowed or not, I never would have agreed to go on this trip if not for Larry’s cancer.

About the Author

Lewis K. Schrager is an author and playwright whose short fiction has twice been honored in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Contest and has appeared in numerous literary journals, including South Carolina Review, Cottonwood, and Bryant Literary Review. His plays have been produced in Baltimore and St. Paul, and The Radical Radiance of the Fishing Fly is his first published novel. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Schrager has also spent much of his professional career in global health, serving as an HIV/AIDS researcher at the National Institutes of Health and as a vaccine developer focused on tuberculosis prevention.

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