Essays by Canadian newspaper reporters and editors on their lives in the news business before social media: "Here are their eulogies to lives dedicated to the fish-wrap business, many of whom, to stretch a metaphor, ended up as obsolete and tossed aside as the fish wrap they churned out."

David Sherman has worked as a newspaper and magazine journalist and editor, CBC radio producer, playwright, filmmaker, screenwriter, singer/songwriter and now novelist. He abandoned the newspaper business when layoffs and budget cuts decimated the industry and concentrated on writing for the theatre and writing and performing as a folksinger. His latest play, Lost and Found, produced by Infinitheatre and written with his partner Nancy Lee, is a musical, inspired in part, by The Alcoholic’s Daughter. They wrote the songs and story and performed the play in Montreal, B.C. and the Laurentiens. Sherman is also a gym rat and was an avid squash layer and cyclist before the body said enough and the medicine chest overflowed. He is now working on another novel in between walking in the woods with his Chocolate Lab named Jesse and swimming in the lake behind his house, a century-old former fishing lodge, where he occasionally obsesses over dinner parties.

David Sherman's profile page

In balancing the fun-loving nostalgia of Fish Wrapped with a poignantly thoughtful narrative of how newspapers are well on the way to being squeezed out of existence, Sherman crafted a piece that deserves inclusion in the time capsule of our journalistic era.

Literary Review of Canada

Fish Wrapped is brilliant, hilarious, unbearably sad—and all true! David Sherman has assembled a Who’s Who of Canadian newspaper journalists and given them what their jobs rarely offered: total freedom to say whatever they want. The result is a mix of high adventure and low living, of incredible delight and equal sorrow. Pour yourself a stiff one, light up that stogie—and step into a world you never got to read about. Until now.

Roy MacGregor, prize-winning journalist, author, member of Order of Canada

What a rich, uproarious collection of stories about the world of journalism and its maverick inhabitants, all told with insight and humour that is timeless.

John Doyle, The Globe & Mail