Fire in the Straw
Notes on Inventing a Life
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
**Named One of the New York Post's Best New Books to Read **
FIRE IN THE STRAW is the witty and deeply felt memoir of Nick Lyons, a man with an intrepid desire to reinvent himself—which he does, over and over.
Nick Lyons shape shifts from reluctant student and graduate of the Wharton School, to English Professor, to husband of a fiercely committed painter, to ghost writer, to famous fly fisherman and award-winning author, to father and then grandfather, to Executive Editor at a large book publishing company, and finally to founder and publisher of his own successful independent press..
Written with the same warm and earthy voice that has enthralled tens of thousands of fly-fishing readers, Nick weaves the disparate chapters of his life: from the moment his widowed mother drops him off at a grim boarding school at the age of five, where he spends three lonely and confusing years; to his love of basketball and pride playing for Penn; to the tumultuous period, in the army and after, when he found and was transformed by literature; to his marriage to Mari, his great love and anchor of his life.
Suddenly, with a PhD in hand and four children, Nick embarks on a complex and thrilling ride, juggling family, fishing, teaching, writing, and publishing, the wolf always at his door. Against all odds, The Lyons Press survives, his children prosper, his wife’s art flourishes, and his books and articles make him a household name.
Fire in the Straw is a love story, a confessional, and a beautiful big-hearted memoir.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lyons (Fishing Stories), publisher of Lyons Press, casts out a sentimental memoir about how he achieved artistic fulfillment over his 80 plus years. In 1937, five-year-old "Nicki" lived happily in the Bronx with his widowed mother, Rose, and her boisterous, Yiddish-speaking family. One day, his mother inexplicably enrolled him at a Westchester County boarding school. Three years later, when she married Arthur Lyons, a "bland, stupidly bossy, unavailable," insurance agent, Nick moved with them into "a pretty little house with fake-stone siding" in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Lyons eventually earned an economics degree from Wharton and served in the U.S. Army, where he discovered his passion for literature, particularly Hemingway: "I had not known that writing about trout fishing... could be so intimate, so visceral," he writes. Upon his discharge, he pursued a literature degree at Bard College, where he met Mari ("mysterious, stubborn, independent"), a painter and his future wife. Lyons's subsequent career included a several decades-long professorship at Hunter College, a number of writing and editing gigs, and establishing his own publishing company that focused on the outdoor sporting lifestyle. Lyons is a thorough narrator, his prose crisp as he recalls his personal and professional accomplishments that he modestly calls "rather ordinary in the details." Though the truth of that admission points to the limited readership for these reminiscences, which likely will be fondly received by industry colleagues and avid collectors of Lyons's odes to fishing, but regarded as rather quiet by others.
