(Late last year, writer Mike Norris and artist David Richardson imagined the members of J. D. Salinger's fictional Glass family, a follow-up to their earlier exploration of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Here's their take on Salinger's most famous novel. -- Levi)

If you were like me, you were a big fan of J.D. Salinger in high school. A big fan. Not only read The Catcher in the Rye, but followed that with Nine Stories, and the Glass family chronicles. Talked about the stories with your friends, contemplated the idiosyncrasies of Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass. Went around with these characters running through your head, perhaps not quite knowing what to make of them.

Then, you moved on. I headed off to college, and I put Salinger behind me. I advanced to the Beats and other writers, and except when reading about Salinger’s death in 2010, I didn’t think much about this famously reclusive writer.

But recently I started re-reading his slim oeuvre.

Salinger’s early life parallels that of Holden Caulfield. He grew up in Manhattan, and there he attended the McBurney School. He showed promise in drama, wrote for the school newspaper, and, like Holden, managed the fencing team. Nevertheless, McBurney expelled Salinger because of his failing grades. He then went to Valley Forge Military Academy near Philadelphia, from which he graduated in 1936. It was at Valley Forge that he started writing stories.

I considered going dark today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (along with Boing Boing, Reddit and Wikipedia), but I decided not to for two reasons. First, I don't think little sites like Litkicks will make much impact at all by going dark. You've got to be pretty huge to pull something like this off effectively. Second, my favorite President has already signaled that he will veto the bad bill, so I'll save my protest for the next good cause. And here are some literary links, many of which seem to revolve around the classics:

1. We were with her a quarter of an hour before Eliz. & Louisa, hot from Mrs Baskerville's Shop, walked in; -- they were soon followed by the Carriage, & another five minutes brought Mr Moore himself, just returned from his morn'g ride. Well! -- & what do I think of Mr Moore? -- I will not pretend in one meeting to dislike him, whatever Mary may say; but I can honestly assure her that I saw nothing in him to admire. -- His manners, as you have always said, are gentlemanlike -- but by no means winning. Most of the letters in the new collection by the genius of Steventon, England, Jane Austen, are not this juicy, but the mundanity of the writer's daily routine is also valuable to read about, and the sickness-to-death letters towards the end are quietly, tragically moving. Jane Austen's Letters, the Fourth Edition, edited by Deirdre Le Faye.

2. James Franco, who was pretty good as Allen Ginsberg in Howl, has made another film based on the life of a 20th Century poet: The Broken Tower, about Hart Crane. Slate isn't impressed, but I'll give it a chance.

3. Ezra Pound's daughter Mary De Rachewitz is trying to make sense of her father's fascist past while protesting an Italian neo-fascist party that has attempted to adopt his name.

"Literary Kicks," says the guy where I pick up my mail, looking at my address on a package. "What is it, sneakers?"

"Books," I say to him. "Books. I'd probably make a lot more money if it was sneakers."

With that said, here are the latest literary links, for your edification and enjoyment:

1. Novelist and critic Walter Kirn, who has suddenly begun live-blogging the Bible, ponders the Tower of Babel.

2. Alan Cumming will star in a one-man performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

3. Check out The Books They Gave Me: A Tumblr for images of books given by former lovers. No, I'm not going to make a Herman Cain joke.

Last weekend we searched for common ground on economic ideology between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street by examining the separate narratives each movement has developed to explain the banking system crash of 2007/2008, and the emotional contexts each narrative brings. Let's spend this weekend looking at the intellectual roots of each protest movement's economic ideology.

The most explosively influential economist of the modern era was Karl Marx, though his dramatic prescriptions for a better society had at least one gigantic problem: they were too stark to result in peaceful change, and instead fed into an atmosphere of global war, counter-reaction and suspicion that has plagued the planet for the last 150 years. Though Marxism turned monstrous in the 20th century, the practical question Karl Marx asked remains vital, and it has been the primary work of 20th century and 21st century economists to formulate better answers to the same question: how should a government manage its economy? Two famous economists, Ludwig von Mises and John Maynard Keynes, have led schools of thought that roughly define the positions of economic protest movements such as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, though not always in simple ways.

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises has been cited by Ron Paul, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck and others as a powerful influence on current libertarian thought, and is widely celebrated among the intellectual branches of the Tea Party movement. Born in 1881 in the center of a turbulent continent, Mises soaked up the fervent political debates swirling around the University of Vienna as a student and then as a professor, and produced a unique defense of free market capitalism that would please any analytic philosopher. A socially progressive (broadly, socialist) government must fail, he argued, because only free market capitalism can provide the basic language with which we can discuss the value of goods and services. The free market does not only serve producers and consumers, but also provides a self-improving mechanism that a centrally-managed economy can never replicate. The success or failure of any commercial venture provides information about what individuals want to buy, and this information will always be accurate and relevant. No matter how well-intentioned a socialist government might be towards its citizens, it will be struck dumb once its citizens lose their freedom to evaluate goods and services in an open market; under socialism, economic progress "would involve operations the value of which could neither be predicted beforehand nor ascertained after they had taken place. Everything would be a leap in the dark."

1. I'm so glad that Charles J. Shields's biography of Kurt Vonnegut (whose birthday is today!) is finally out. I've been looking forward to And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life for a long time -- though now that it's out I've got a few other books to get through before I can begin. This will be my slow pleasure reading for the holiday season.

The famous allegory of the cave is hardly the highlight of Plato's great Republic, though commentators sometimes treat the extended metaphor -- a person in a cave is temporarily blinded when he sees sunlight for the first time, and is then ridiculed when he returns to the cave and can no longer distinguish the shadows on the walls -- as if it were a capsule summary of Plato's entire philosophy. Perhaps the brilliance of the philosopher's writing has itself blinded these commentators, because the allegory of the cave is mainly an illustration of the difficulty of understanding a provocative philosophy, and hardly represents the essence of Plato's philosophy itself.

1. Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly, includes pieces by J. G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Philip Roth, Rudy Rucker and Robert Crumb. Here's the full table of contents.

2. And the Nobel Prize in Literature goes to ... some dude I never heard of! Which kind of surprises me, since I thought I sort of knew this space. Anyway, meet Tomas Transtromer of Stockholm, Sweden. Words Without Borders has him, of course.

3. I couldn't find any Tomas Transtromer at Asymptote, another new journal of international/translated literature I've started looking at, but they do have Robert Walser (translated by Susan Bernofsky), Lin Yoade and a new translation by Mani Rao of an old Upanishad.

1. Here at Litkicks, we love pretty much anything David Byrne ever does. His latest enigma is a series of nonexistent iPhone apps, including "Invisible Me" above, which will be displayed as part of a Pace Gallery show called "Social Media" in New York City this fall.

2. "Very Naked, No Lunch." So intones an Austrian hipster in Beat Today, a film that explores the meaning of the Beat Generation as it is manifested today within the counterculture of Central Europe. It's by Tilman Otto Wagner of Vienna, who has also written a book called The Beat Generation and Scholastic Analysis.

3. Exciting news! Litkicks favorite Art Spiegelman is writing a book about his book Maus, aptly titled MetaMaus. He'll be appearing at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to explain what this book will be.

1. Look at this beauty. It's a new facsimile edition of a past illustrated premium of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, known as the Splendid Edition. Oxford University Press has published it as a replica of the original object, and it's attractive enough to get me started reading the book for the first time. The first few pages present a witty tale of manners and intrigue among Southern gentleman, in a tone somewhat reminiscent of Dickens or Thackeray. Good enough to keep me reading.

2. Augusten Burroughs's beleageured mother Margaret Robison has written her own side of the Running With Scissors story, a book called The Long Journey Home.

(This is the first guest post in the Philosophy Weekend series. James Berrettini is a friend and fellow software developer with whom I've conducted intensive private debates over difficult questions of philosophy and ethics for many years. He and I often disagree, but I know he shares my belief that these questions are keenly relevant to modern life. Here's James's introduction to a popular but misunderstood writer and thinker, C. S. Lewis. -- Levi)

Sarah Palin was mocked for telling Barbara Walters for saying that she turns to C. S. Lewis for "divine inspiration." Richard Wolffe, a commentator on Chris Matthews' show, thought this indicated a lack of seriousness, assuming that she was referring to "a series of kids' books." Defending Lewis, Matthews interrupted saying: "I wouldn’t put down C.S. Lewis." Wolfe continued: “I’m not putting him down. But, you know, 'divine inspiration'? There are things she could’ve said for 'divine inspiration.' Choosing C.S. Lewis is an interesting one."

C. S. Lewis was indeed an interesting writer, if not for the reasons that Wolffe believes. Like many people, he was unfamiliar with Lewis beyond knowing that he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia books, which we all "know" now, thanks to the good people at Walden Media, Walt Disney Pictures, and 20th Century Fox. Who was Lewis?