It’s back to school time for many and the required reading lists are out in full force. Whether you’ve been handed a list or have one of your own creation, we’d like to hear what you’ve been reading lately, how you feel about it and what you’re planning to pick up next. (If you need some recommendations, this is the place to get those as well.) Jamelah’s reading the classics, but what are you reading?

As the cities of the Gulf Coast struggle to recover from Hurricane Katrina, it’s worth a few moments to think of the literary legacies now floating in the floodwaters.

In New Orleans, Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski and Blance DuBois are all in the same boat, but Blanche’s paper lanterns don’t stand a chance. They may or may not run into John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius Reilly, who is most likely huddling with his mom in the SuperDome, complaining about the confederacy of dunces.

Way out …

My quest to read the classics continues, this time with everybody’s favorite literary enigma. That’s right, I’m talking about Shakespeare, the writer people like to say wasn’t Shakespeare at all, but rather, a blind, lyre-playing Greek who — wait, now I’m getting confused with Homer.

But then, it’s easy to get Shakespeare and Homer confused, because they both wrote about the Trojan War. You know, the one with the horse. Yes, that’s right, they both covered the story of the …

Long Island poet and friend of LitKicks George Wallace recently travelled to Crawford, Texas to hand a poem to antiwar protestor Cindy Sheehan. He sent us this report of his journey:

1. HOLDING DOWN THE FORT

It sneaked up on me really.

I do think that what a person does in life is a complex package of political statements, but I’m not a particularly active person politically speaking. During the Vietnam War I protested some. The usual stuff, really - when Nixon
came to the War Memorial …

I don’t know if young author Chelsea Cain is ready to write for the NY Times Book Review yet. “He peppers his colorful tale with words like ‘rigmarole’ and ‘mawkish’”, she tells us in reviewing Jeffrey Ford’s The Girl in the Glass. Golly gee! This type of uncharacteristic lameness pervades several pieces in today’s Book Review, which seems to have been produced by a backup crew while the regular editors gather for one last week in the Hamptons.

I’m not sure what …

A friend with a young son just alerted me to a new, very cute series of kid’s books about a bear based on Henry David Thoreau. Well, I can think of worse things for a little kid to read. It started when D. B. Johnson wrote Henry Hikes To Fitchburg (based on an incident from Walden). In a later installment, Henry Builds A Cabin.

All of my life, I have been Other. Easily identifiable yet enigmatic, with brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin, white people can tell I’m not one of them, yet have a hard time placing me. Hispanic? Italian? Native American? Nobody knows, yet the guesses pile up. (I’m an Arab, at least halfway, but nobody picks that.) Ambiguity freaks people out. I’ve learned this.

All of my life, I’ve stood between two cultures — the white Southern Christian world of my …

Billectric thought you might all enjoy this interview with Felipe Alfau. Here are some choice lines:

ILAN STAVANS: Why did you become a writer?

FELIPE ALFAU: I am not a professional writer. Only by necessity have I ever received payment for my work. Dalkey Archive Press offered money for my two novels but I refused to accept it. For my poems I received $500 because I needed to pay the monthly payment here, in the retirement home. The truth is, I was …

(U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser is writing a series of columns that highlights poetry and its importance in everyday life. From time to time we’ll share the reprinted columns here, and provide you a chance to add your comments. I’m a bit behind in posting this, as it was actually last week’s selection, however I thought it was appropriate in light of our coverage of Hunter S. Thompson’s recent sendoff. This snapshot of a moment of remembrance is one we …

Today at The Guardian, columnist Tim Clare proclaims “Everyone does not have a novel inside them.” However, if that’s the case, then what’s this mysterious bump on my ribcage? And more to the point, is the market saturated with too many people trying to shop their story? If so, is this necessarily a bad thing and who cares? Ironically enough, Tim Clare apparently had a novel inside him at some point, as it came out as a sci-fi venture, Joshu …