The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing: 25th-Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

The 25th anniversary edition of the New York Times bestselling classic that chronicles a young woman’s journey in work, love, and life, with a new foreword by Nick Hornby

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing maps the progress of Jane Rosenal as she sets out on a spirited expedition through the perilous terrain of sex, love, relationships, and the treacherous waters of the workplace. Jane befriends her older brother’s doomed lovers; is swept off her feet into a Fitzgerald-esque whirl of cocktail parties and country houses; and soon comes to realize that this world where rules were made to be broken may be one where the stakes are much too high for comfort. Upon its release in June of 1999 by Viking, this generous-hearted and wickedly insightful novel became an instant bestseller as it touched a nerve with female readers everywhere. With a timeless, unforgettable comic touch, Bank skillfully teases out universal issues, puts a clever new spin on the mating dance, and captures in perfect pitch what it’s like to come of age as a young woman.

Praise for The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing

Bridget Jones. Well, that’s out of the way…. Anybody who writes about Melissa Bank’s new book…without mentioning Helen Fielding’s bestseller of last summer is doing so just to be contrary, and should not be trusted…[but] Bank’s is a far more subtle piece of work, which achieves even more than it aims to.

—The New Yorker

Charming and funny.

—The New York Times

"[A]s hilarious as The Girls’ Guide is, there’s a wise, serious core here that distinguishes Ms. Bank."

—The Wall Street Journal

Bank writes like John Cheever, but funnier.

—Los Angeles Times

Crafted by a gifted writer, a descendant from the school of restraint whose grandfather is Hemingway and whose father is early Raymond Carver. The presiding mother figure…is Lily Tomlin.

—The News and Observer

Writing literature that mixes comedy and tragedy in the proper amounts is not an easy task. Only a handful of contemporary writers (Joseph Heller, Anne Tyler, and John Irving come to mind) can do it with any success. Whether dealing with serious issues or mundane, Bank proves that she has what it takes to stand in such august company.

—The Denver Post

"Reading The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank, I felt I’d found a new best friend."

—Houston Chronicle

"A coming-of-age story that is one of the best since Catcher in the Rye."

—The Kansas City Star

[A] truly poignant novel.

—Time

Bank draws exquisite portraits of loneliness, and she can do it in a sentence.

—Newsweek

One of the most satisfying, effortless story collections to come around in a long time…Melissa Bank accomplishes that hardest of simple things: she shows life as it is—and makes it readable.

—The Washington Post Book World

A gorgeous and wise short-story collection.

—Mademoiselle

A sexy, pour-your-heart-out, champagne tingle of a read—thoughtful, wise, and tell-all honest. Bank’s is a voice that you’ll remember for years to come.

—Cosmopolitan

In her fictional debut, Melissa Bank brings a fresh eye to the mating dance.

—People

First-time author Bank made major publishing news last year when she scored a six-figure advance for this collection of linked stories about a sensitive, witty New Yorker named Jane Rosenal. Believe the hype: Jane’s touching (but unsentimental) career and love trials ring true.

—Glamour

Not quite a novel, the collection builds its appeal under the reader’s thrill at reencountering Jane throughout her young life—always older, sometimes wiser, still smoking. From one story to the next, we look forward to meeting her again.

—Vogue

Melissa Bank is a talented writer whose gifts promise wider territory ahead.

—The Boston Globe

In recent years only a few authors have successfully blended the compressed nature of short prose with the novel’s greater panorama of character. Melissa Bank brings similar energy and style to her new book.

—Chicago Tribune

One marvels at Bank’s assured control of her material, witty, distinctive voice, and her ability to find pathos and drama in ordinary lives.

—Publishers Weekly (boxed and starred review)

A smart, ruefully funny chronicle of a modern young woman’s search for love…Bank has created a delightful heroine who deserves her happy ending.

—Kirkus Reviews

A compassionate comedy of manners, pitch-perfect…Bank’s people are fully realized and, just like us, fond, foolish, blind, and wise by turns and in ways both tenderly familiar and refreshingly odd.

—Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of Away and Lucky Us

The Lit World’s New ‘It’ Girl.

—New York Magazine

Penguin

Classics

THE GIRLS’ GUIDE TO HUNTING AND FISHING

Melissa Bank (1960–2022) was the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot, which have been translated into thirty languages. Her short stories and nonfiction were published in the Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Ploughshares, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, O, The Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere, as well as broadcast by NPR and the BBC. She won the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and held an MFA from Cornell University. A longtime resident of New York City and East Hampton, New York, she taught in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton and wrote until her passing in 2022.

Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including Just Like You, High Fidelity, and About a Boy, and several works of nonfiction including Fever Pitch. He has also written numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 1999

Published in Penguin Books 2000

This edition with a foreword by Nick Hornby published in Penguin Books 2024

Copyright © 1999 by Melissa Bank

Foreword copyright © 2024 by Nick Hornby

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

Some of the stories in this book first appeared in the following publications: Advanced Beginners (as Lucky You) in The North American Review; The Floating House in Another Chicago Magazine; My Old Man (as Dennis the Menace and Mr. Wilson) in Chicago Tribune; The Best Possible Light in Other Voices; and The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing in Zoetrope: All-Story.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted works: One Art from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. The Commuter’s Lament or A Close Shave © Norman B. Colp 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bank, Melissa, author. | Hornby, Nick, writer of foreword.

Title: The girls’ guide to hunting and fishing / Melissa Bank ; foreword by Nick Hornby.

Other titles: The girls’ guide to hunting and fishing (Compilation)

Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2024. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2023053104 | ISBN 9780143138150 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593512289 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Young women—Fiction. | LCGFT: Short stories.

Classification: LCC PS3552.A487 G57 2024 | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20231124

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023053104

Ebook ISBN 9780593512289

Cover design: Lynn Buckley

Cover images: (swimsuit) Shutterstock; (anchor) Getty Images

Interior design adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed

These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword by Nick Hornby

Acknowledgments

THE GIRLS’ GUIDE TO HUNTING AND FISHING

Advanced Beginners

The Floating House

My Old Man

The Best Possible Light

The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine

You Could Be Anyone

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing

_148350564_

TO MY REAL-LIFE GIRL GUIDES

Adrienne Brodeur, Carole DeSanti,

Carol Fiorino, Molly Friedrich,

Judy Katz, and Anna Wingfield

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

One Art, from The Complete Poems 1927–1979, by Elizabeth Bishop

Foreword

I met Melissa Bank in the late twentieth century, in between the publication of her two books—the one you are holding (let’s pretend that it is the late twentieth century, and you have no choice but to hold a book in order to read it) and The Wonder Spot. I can’t remember how or why we met, but for a while we hung out whenever I was in New York or she was in London. I loved spending time with her. She wanted to talk, and to listen, and to laugh as loudly and as frequently as possible. But she was acutely observant, shrewd, endlessly sympathetic and, above all, loving. It seemed to me that she met people hoping she could love them.

And she was fearless. I had already read The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing when we met—so, like everyone else, I was a fan. When I was putting together Speaking with the Angel, an anthology of short stories with contributions from Irvine Welsh and Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith and a whole bunch of other people, Melissa was someone whose work I very much wanted to include. She gave me The Wonder Spot, the story not the book, and she came to London when Speaking with the Angel was launched. The launch party was an enormous event in the Hammersmith Palais, the much-loved gig venue, now gone, that the Clash sang about. Teenage Fanclub played, and well-known actors read a couple of stories to an excitable crowd. It was a tough gig even for the actors—experienced, professional show-offs—and only one of the authors wanted to read her own work to the noisy spectators: Melissa, the one who had only recently published her debut book. Everyone in that audience, many of whom had had more than one drink, listened to every word. She was a knockout.

Reading interviews with Melissa now, all these years later, it’s interesting and a little depressing to see how often she seemed to be required to defend herself. The introduction to one of them includes the line, Certainly the pages turn without too much difficulty, however, as if this is somehow beside the point of reading, before the (male) interviewer asks the author whether she thinks chick-lit is a demeaning term.

Let me help you out, Mr. Interviewer. Yes, it’s a demeaning term: it usually means, People are buying and reading and loving this book, and they are not buying and reading and loving mine. So they are cheating in some way. People who write about books used to worry a lot about whether a book was Literature or not back then, weirdly. They worried especially if the book had jokes in it. The vast majority of readers didn’t and still don’t think about that at all. Melissa’s retort, which was a good one, was this: For me, a lot of the work comes in refining it. Even if I’m saying something that I think of as having real depth or substance, I don’t want to say it in a way that bogs a reader down. I’m after something else. In other words, what often gets talked about as Literature is simply a couple of drafts short of being something that people can consume with any pleasure. Melissa’s way of creating literature was to write simple, plain sentences, in many different colors, and lay them next to each other until they formed a beautiful mosaic, and this mosaic was placed over a bed of melancholy that you are only dimly aware of when first the story and then the book are over. There’s the complexity. There’s the art, and the depth.

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing is about two decades in the life of a young woman, Jane Rosenal. This, of course, is asking for trouble—or at least, asking for a snooty critic to dismiss it in patronizing terms while admitting at the same time that it’s entertaining and funny. But Jane Rosenal is dealing with growing up (she’s a teenager in the first story), loneliness, a career that she may or may not be suitable for, inappropriate and unsatisfying sexual relationships, mortally ill parents, doubt, confusion. She’s dealing with the stuff of life, in other words, the only life an ordinary young woman—or man—in a big city knows, and she thinks about it, and despairs over it, and makes jokes about it. (This book is full of terrific one-liners, all of which deserve the compliment of being left where they belong, in the body of the book, so that you can enjoy them as they were meant to be enjoyed.)

When Melissa died, I posted a picture on Instagram of her, and me, and our friend the writer Sarah Vowell. I want to quote a couple of the comments that people posted underneath. The first, from a publisher, said, "Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing changed my relationship to reading forever. I still think about it all the time. The other, from a writer, said The Wonder Spot is one of my all-time favorite novels. I keep [it] by my desk for inspiration and re-read it every year." You could find similar sentiments all over the internet. Both of her beautiful books, I was happy and sad to see, meant a great deal to a whole generation of writers. I doubt that she understood that when she was alive, and she wouldn’t have believed it anyway. She wasn’t the type.

I miss her, of course. Everyone who knew her misses her. But you will miss her, too, if you are about to read this book for the first time. You will wish that there were ten or fifteen other books to catch up on; you will be sorry that we can’t read about one of her characters coming to grips with cell phones, dating apps, gender identity, bitter political division, or any of the other twenty-first-century material that Melissa would have written about so well. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing is nearly a quarter of a century old, and people go on discovering it, reading it, laughing at the jokes, and being moved by it, just as they do with I Capture the Castle, or the novels of Muriel Spark, or True Grit. Longevity is the only indicator of literature that really matters, and this book is built to last.

Nick Hornby

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Alexandra Babanskyj, Barbara Grossman, Susan Petersen, and Paul Slovak at Viking; to Francis Coppola, Karla Eoff, Alicia Patterson, Samantha Schnee, and Joanna Yas at Zoetrope: All-Story; to Kathy Minton and Isaiah Sheffer at Selected Shorts; to Lucy Childs and Paul Cirone at the Aaron Priest Literary Agency; to my trusty readers—Michael Atmore, Joan Bank, Donna Barba, Margery Bates, Scott Bryson, Arthur Chernoff, Paul Cody, Jane Dickinson, Hunter Hill, Mitch Karsch, Ken Katz, Peter Landesman, Alex Moon, Jane Moriarty, Sylvie Rabineau, Michael Ruby, Oren Rudavsky, Julie Schumacher, Sandy Stillman, Joe Sweet, John Szalay, Jack Wettling, Judy Wohl—and especially Garth Wingfield, who helped me with every version of every story; and, finally, thanks to my brother, Andrew Bank, for listening to all the boring details, making me laugh every day, and always coming to the rescue.

ADVANCED BEGINNERS

While home is the place where you can relax and be yourself, this doesn’t mean that you can take advantage of the love and affection other members of your family have for you.

—From 20th Century Typewriting by D. D. Lessenberry, T. James Crawford, and Lawrence W. Erickson

My brother’s first serious girlfriend was eight years older—twenty-eight to his twenty. Her name was Julia Cathcart, and Henry introduced her to us in early June. They drove from Manhattan down to our cottage in Loveladies, on the New Jersey shore. When his little convertible, his pet, pulled into the driveway, she was behind the wheel. My mother and I were watching from the kitchen window. I said, He lets her drive his car.

My brother and his girlfriend were dressed alike, baggy white shirts tucked into jeans, except she had a black cashmere sweater over her shoulders.

She had dark eyes, high cheekbones, and beautiful skin, pale, with high coloring in her cheeks like a child with a fever. Her hair was back in a loose ponytail, tied with a piece of lace, and she wore tiny pearl earrings.

I thought maybe she’d look older