A few weeks ago I wrote about Susan Sontag’s essay “Illness as Metaphor”. Sontag’s concept was to analyze society’s response to a disease the same way a literary critic might analyze society’s response to a text. In the 80’s, she wrote of AIDS as the tragically metaphorical illness of that age.

I wonder if autism might be the metaphor for our new millenium, or at least our new millenium’s first decade.

Autism is a psychological syndrome characterized by emotional shutdown. Severely …

Lucien Carr died Friday of complications from cancer treatment. He was 79 years old. Carr is known as a figure in the Beat Generation and also as a reporter and editor for the United Press International news service.

Carr was a big influence on Kerouac, appearing as Kenneth Wood in the novel The Town and the City. He also supplied the now-legendary roll of paper that became the manuscript for On the Road.

(To learn more about Lucien Carr, read the LitKicks article here.)

In …

Though my mother has been living in Michigan since she was eight, traces of the South still cling to her speech patterns, and consequently, have worked their way into mine. It never fails to surprise me that when I actually listen to the sound of my own voice, there’s a hint of Southern rounding out the edges of my otherwise flat Midwestern accent.

I think of Southern writers I admire, like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor, and how their writing is fueled by …

As we all know, literature can be a powerful force in our lives, beyond just the initial enjoyment of reading. Books not only make us think but they can make us laugh, inspire us to take action and teach us something new. Some stories can move us to tears because they are so touching (or in some cases, because they’re so badly written). Some books are so suspensful or downright scary that you have to sleep with the lights on. Once …

I was reminiscing about the good old days of ‘Silicon Alley’ with a bunch of old friends last week, at a gathering in a small downtown Manhattan bar.

This was a reunion of about thirty of us who’d been part of the New York City internet/new media industry in the early days, back before the stock craze of 1999, back before the stock crash of 2001. As I sat there treading through memories with my former co-workers, I kept thinking about how idealistic …

All obvious creepiness aside, an interesting writing exercise is that of obituary writing. Whose obituary should you write? Yours, of course.

Pretend you’re dead. What will the newspaper say about you? How did you go? Freak fishing accident? Accidental decapitation? Who survives you? What kind of memorial service will you have? Something traditional, or will you have your ashes shot into space?

Tell all. Spare no details. Go.

Some of the best stories often come from experiences had while traveling — whether you’re visiting a familiar destination or taking the road less traveled. The adventure and process of getting from one place to another seems to encourage the storyteller in all of us. I travel by train quite frequently and I’m pretty sure I could fill a whole book with observations of the random assortment of people who wind up sitting next to me. The wide variety of people and …

When I heard that U.S. Army Reserve Specialist Charles Graner was sentenced to ten years in military prison for abusing prisoners-of-war at Abu Ghraib, I immediately thought of “In the Penal Colony,” a famous short story published by Franz Kafka in 1919.

In this stark story, a prison officer is demonstrating a high-tech torture device to a mysterious visitor. This device is designed to kill prisoners over a period of twelve hours by slowly writing a few corrective words — such as “Honor Thy Superiors”, …

The writings of Shakespeare are often suffered through by students in literature classes, and this suffering is generally paired with one inescapable lesson: William Shakespeare is the most exalted poet to have written in English. Ever.

Shakespeare is credited with creating (either through the addition of prefixes or suffixes or through plain old inventiveness) about 1700 words that linger in today’s lexicon, including the following: addiction, blushing, eyeball, lonely, obscene, swagger, and my personal favorite, madcap. To have invented one or two or even …

We often ask “What Are You Reading“, or, occasionally, “What Are You Not Reading?“

Since many of us are not only fans of literature but active writers as well, I’m curious to know, what are you writing? Tell us a bit about your works in progress or what style or writing has your attention lately. Are you working on some new short stories? Putting together a poetry chapbook? Perhaps you’re working on a novel or even a term paper that’s …