Monthly Archives: December, 2012
Holiday Hindsight: Lit Mags for the Empty-Handed
This is the season of the balance sheet. I don’t mean the kind where you tabulate all your shining moments and painful shortcomings—we still have a few days left before you need to get that maudlin—but rather the post-holiday period when you finally get a good sense of how many people gave you gifts for [...]
The Language of Flowers 2012: “Gawd Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” Limited Edition
Back in the heat of the dog days, our roving correspondent Dena Santoro reported on finding an 1875 copy of The Language of Flowers in a London bookshop in 1988. And here, as a gift to all you fine folks who have stuck by Like Fire throughout the year, is her limited holiday edition, updated [...]
A Song On the End of the World
A Song On the End of the World Czeslaw Milosz (translated by Anthony Milosz) On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net. Happy porpoises jump in the sea, By the rainspout young sparrows are playing And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be. On [...]
Seasonal Shorts
All right, here comes the extra-long holiday weekend! Full of festive fun, family, and friends… or a host of other F-words: fatigued, forlorn, fractious. Maybe it’s just a blessed break from work or school. Or maybe you are working, either because you’re indispensable or just happy to take the overtime when things are quiet. Maybe [...]
Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White: Dalkey Archive Press and That Job Ad
If you work in publishing, or are looking for a job in publishing, you may have seen the help wanted ad posted by Dalkey Archive Press last week. The University of Illinois-based press is looking to expand its London office and move on from founder John O’Brien’s stewardship, with two or three people at the [...]
Willow, Weep: Tim Knowles’ Tree Drawings
Not particularly literary, I guess, but for anyone as in need of a little inner peace as I’ve been this weekend, I offer you artist Tim Knowles’ Tree Drawings: A series of drawings produced using drawing implements attached to the tips of tree branches, the wind’s effects on the tree, recorded on paper. Like signatures [...]
Open Letters Monthly, December 2012
It’s the middle of December already. Honestly, all I can do is shake my head at that one. But we’re back in business here, just in time for all those festivities. And whether you’ve been naughty or nice or—one hopes—a little more hard to pin down than that, Open Letters Monthly has a neat gift [...]
On Deborah Eisenberg at Bloom
With all due apologies for the end-of-semester posting paucity—one more week and we should be back on a somewhat more regular schedule—I have a new piece up at Bloom. Being the site’s Senior Writer holds all sorts of fine perks: a corner office, expense-account lunches, glamour, prestige… well, OK. Maybe not. But I can bring [...]
