Category Archives: Lineup
On Beyond Chekhov: Introducing The Russian Library
When Russian writers come up in conversation, as they are wont to, you can always count on someone—or an entire chorus—admitting to huge gaps in their reading and confiding that they really need to address the situation. I know because I’m one of them. I fully intend to read War and Peace and Anna Karenina [...]
A Blizzard of Nonfiction from Byliner
Looks like we’re going to get a little weather here on the east coast this weekend. Which doesn’t sound too distressing, honestly… there’s a bag and a half of rock salt in the garage, we had the roof patched this past fall, and—that ageless refrain—I have plenty to read. Granted, much of it is required, [...]
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 [...]
The Imaginary Library of Charles Dickens
It’s corny but true: Book people are always fussing with their shelves. Forget about the cliché of art books artfully arranged on the coffee table; forget about shoving that copy of Vogue underneath the London Review of Books when company’s coming. The tendency to be voyeuristic with one’s own home library and rearrange it now [...]
Are Bare Trees in Snow the New Legs?
I know every armchair book design critic remembers when it seemed like every other trade novel had a pair of legs as its main cover element. I want to say it was just a few years ago, but a quick search pulls up this Chicago Tribune article on the subject from 2003. And that makes [...]
Dull Roar
Because Fridays in August really shouldn’t be that complicated, I give you Bookride’s The Joy of Dullness, a collection of books that are not just dull, but weirdly dull. Or as the Bookride blokes put it, “The collection is devoted to dullness mixed with the curious and the odd which includes the oddly dull and [...]
Dancing About Architecture
While no one can agree on who first came up with the saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture—Frank Zappa? Laurie Anderson? Thelonious Monk? Martin Mull?—it doesn’t really matter anyway, because it’s wrong. Many good words have been devoted to music over the years by fans and critics and scholars and auteurs, [...]
The Lineup: The Tomes of Mitford, By and About
In its first draft, this list comprised several dozen titles—too much even for rabid Mitford aficionados, although it seems a piker’s tabulation to me. Nevertheless, it made sense to winnow it down to a more approachable chunk here. Caveat: There may be more such lists in future, if you’re good. English-speaking peoples (not to say [...]
The Tomes of August
There’s still a week left to the last long month of true summer, and Like Fire is pleased to bring you The Tomes of August. Which, naturally, must start with… The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman This hour-by-hour account of the first month of what then was the Great War, which we now [...]
In Auteur Words: Soft Skull’s Deep Focus
Is it too wretched of a pun to say that I’m on record as being a huge fan of Continuum’s 33-1/3 books? I love the package, those beautiful little paperbacks in which various writers go in deep about the albums that moved them, and they’ve been consistently good as well. From Andy Miller on The [...]
