Carl E. Reed inhabits a book-crammed, 2-bedroom apt. above a Chinese restaurant in NW Chicago. An omnivorous reader, Carl practices old-school writer's discipline: He reads 10, 000 sentences for each one that he writes. The tales he tells are Kafkaesque axes, forged to crack open that frozen, inward sea imprisoning both the emotions and the intellect. He hopes that the reader will re-engage with story as the portal of entry into a richer, more fully-realized, culturally-aware and empathetic humanity. He is cheerfully dismissive of all obscurantist cant and dogma and endlessly exasperated at the antics of the ignorant, the willfully stupid and the criminally insane.