Category Archives: People
David Foster Wallace at the Ransom Center
Somewhere in a box, I have a number of notebooks from middle school and high school. Not all of them, but some kind of random sampling that my curatorial self saw fit, once upon a time, to save. Once in a while I’ll give in to the urge to look through one, and it always [...]
Rules for Writing
So Elmore Leonard wrote a book called Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. Having read Leonard’s rules (the short version of them, although the fact that he managed to stretch them into a whole book fills me with wonder), I can report that they are either pedestrian (I mean, my high-school English teacher taught me [...]
MJ Rose’s Backstory: Masha Hamilton
I learned I was pregnant in the midst of covering the intefedah in Gaza and the West Bank. The doctor asked what I did for a living and what I knew about the stages of pregnancy and then he shook his head. “Try to avoid tear gas for the next few months,” he said. I [...]
“In Love Over Both Ears”
Happy Valentine’s Day to all our Like Fire friends and readers. True, it’s a Hallmark holiday guaranteed to make a large swath of the population feel underappreciated or inappropriate. But then again, it’s also all about love and chocolate, both of which we wholeheartedly endorse.
My favorite link of the day is a sweetly unironic piece [...]
“Be Just and If You Can’t Be Just, Be Arbitrary.”
Today is the birthday of William S. Burroughs: writer, performer, critic, painter, wife-shooter, cat-lover, addict, bunker-dweller.
That last point recently caught the attention of photographer Peter Ross. Throughout most of the ’70s Burroughs lived in The Bunker, a partially renovated YMCA locker room on New York’s Lower East Side. He moved out in 1981, and the [...]
Not Just Sex for Sex’s Sake
Over at The Rumpus last week, Jami Attenberg and Kate Christensen had a gratifyingly indelicate conversation about sex and writing (with a very NSFW tab header, if there’s any danger of someone reading over your shoulder). It made me nod in agreement, it made me want a whiskey straight up and a cigarette, and it [...]
Another Sad Day
Louis Auchincloss, Chronicler of New York’s Upper Crust, Dies at 92
… Although he practiced law full time until 1987, Mr. Auchincloss published more than 60 books of fiction, biography and literary criticism in a writing career of more than a half-century. He was best known for his dozens and dozens of novels about what he [...]
New Yorker fiction (Jan 18) – “A Death in Kitchawank”
As if we needed any prompting to consider again our stance in the midst of life’s vagaries, along comes a smooth and elegant story from T. Coraghessan Boyle that pushes its readers to do just that.
The life and times of a lakefront neighborhood are depicted in brisk and sweeping brush strokes over the course of [...]
MJ Rose’s Backstory: Katharine Weber
(Like Fire is pleased to be the new home of MJ Rose’s Backstory, originally featured on her blog Buzz Balls and Hype. Backstory is where authors share truths that sparked their fiction, the impulse behind their memoirs or that “AHA” moment that led to a work of nonfiction. First up is Katharine Weber, whose [...]
