Category Archives: Holiday Madness
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 [...]
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 [...]
Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds
Some three years ago, I wrote a post here that touched on several things, including some satisfying book art, Joseph Cornell, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, his book-length exploration of the reasons he became a vegetarian. (And where I once again prominently used the word “aleatory”—if only this were a drinking game!) I ended [...]
In Search of the Perfect Haggadah
I am behind schedule. On pretty much everything: blog posts and Web code and returning phone calls and replying to email. This is partly because my husband is out of town and I have three children with a shocking number of social commitments; partly because my son is, as ever, sick (if someone within a [...]
Holiday Wishes
Happy holidays from our friends at GalleyCat! And from all of us at Like Fire to all of you, dear readers. Peace on earth, at the very least.
Snow It Goes
A great find from GalleyCat: this year’s holiday card from the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. Vonnegut’s phrase, “So it goes”—also the title of a sharp new biography of the writer by Charles Shields, which I’ll report back on soon—had darker connotations in Slaughterhouse-Five. Here, though, it gently lends a little of his cockeyed fatalism to [...]
Gifts of Gab
Getting a little close to the wire, is it? All right, then, let’s dispense with all this advice on cheap gifts and get right to the free stuff. Over at the Boston Globe, Erin McKean has a list of stealthy holiday gifts for the “verbally inclined” who may not have much to spend—am I being [...]
Books and Booze on Big Night
It’s Big Night out there, folks—if someone’s having a holiday party, there’s a good 90% chance it’s tonight. Great fun taking the train out to wherever you’re going in the evening, seeing everyone all dressed up and eager; much less so coming back after midnight, when one fears for one’s shoes. In case you have [...]
Blue Monday Wednesday: Book Sales and Gift Ideas
While we’re a bit wide of the mark for another Blue Monday Shopping Guide for the Broke and Overbooked—a couple of other writing projects have been distracting; all good stuff—there are a few good deals being offered by some of our favorite publishers that should be noted. Dalkey Archive Press, home of some great innovative [...]
