I’d read and thoroughly enjoyed Brock Clarke’s story collection Carrying the Torch. And so it was with some interest this fall that I purchased for the library An Arsonist’s Guide to New England Writers’ Homes. Talk about a book that needed to be written. It’s all there: the spiritual, existentially depressed vacuum that is the memoir section at Barnes and Nobles, the alcoholism and adultery lurking beneath the polished veneer of academia. And although this book, like its author, will not claim to make you a better person, or really teach you anything, it will probably entertain you and help you to take things that are often taken too seriously less seriously. Fortunately for me, on his blog, Clarke answers the question of whether the character Peter LeClair in the book is in any way connected to Tom LeClair, prodigious fiction professor at the old University of Cincinnati English Department.