“Real Guys’, writes Scott Sadil in Fly Tales, his collection of literary essays, “belong to an inner circle of expert anglers— men and women of rarefied gifts whose skills and knowledge and perhaps fortune of good breeding have positioned them in territory the rest of us can only glimpse or occasionally admire.”

But are Real Guys real?

Follow Scott Sadil through more than three dozen essays as he aims for membership into that “cadre of insiders” who, he wants to believe, rarely if ever suffer the kinds of defeats that he has known all too well throughout his angling career. In the tradition of fine literature from hearth, home, and afield, Sadil completes each lesson with his pattern for a fly that has proven integral to these gracefully articulated steps along his arduous journey to fish like a Real Guy.