Best-selling author Richard Paul Evans has a new novel featuring a narrator with Tourette’s syndrome.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

When Nathan gets snowed in at the Denver airport at Thanksgiving, he offers half his hotel suite to a stranded needy family: recently divorced single mom Addison (a massage therapist), and her two children, Lizzy and Collin. Collin, who has leukemia, cures Nathan’s Tourette’s with his gift of healing touch. Exercising his secret gift makes Collin sicker, though, and as news of his healing powers eventually leaks out, leading to a demand for his services, his condition worsens. Nathan, meanwhile, feels emboldened by his cure, and moves to address childhood woes when visiting his nursing home–bound mother. The tightly honed narrative, brimming with good intention to find courage in shared suffering, soon brings everyone together.

Excerpt in USA Today.

From the Providence Journal:

Alicia Vanasse attends Rhode Island College full-time. She is an honor student, vice president of the senior class and president of the Communications Club. She has a job as an intern in the college’s public relations office. She has friends. She dates. She owns a car, a midnight blue convertible Sebring that she loves in the way people do when they are young and the car means freedom.

She also has Tourette syndrome. Three years ago, a college life would have been unimaginable for Alicia. Now, thanks to new medication and supportive college staff, she is thriving.

“I’ve always been ‘that girl with Tourette’s,’ ” she said. “But here I’ve been given the chance to just be Alicia. People have been willing to work with me, to help me. I haven’t found that anywhere else.”

By Molly Knoedler, writing in the Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Press:

Tourette’s Syndrome doesn’t prevent me from doing the things I want to do. I play soccer and basketball. I’m in the school play. TS doesn’t threaten my health. So many people have (or had) TS and you probably don’t realize it. Samuel Johnson, a poet and critic who wrote “A Dictionary of English Language” had tic disorder. Jim Eisenreich, a famous baseball player, also struggled with TS but managed to continue playing baseball. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is believed to have TS, though experts are not sure.

I’ve had Tourette’s Syndrome for about a year now. I don’t know how long I’ll have to take medicine. Maybe there will be a cure found in my lifetime.

But there’s a saying that people with tic disorder have: “I have Tourette’s. Tourette’s doesn’t have me.”

South Park‘s fall season begins this week with a new gimmick: Tourette’s syndrome.

In the premiere episode, Cartman discovers the joys of having Tourette’s syndrome. Drunk with the power of saying whatever he wants without getting in trouble for it, Cartman lines up national TV coverage to take advantage of his new life with no filters.

Series co-creator Matt Stone says the scenario is so natural, “we wondered why we hadn’t thought of it before.”

Good question, because the scenario was the basis of an entire season of “Big Brother” in the UK last year, in which the winning contestant on the reality show had Tourette’s. Some criticized series organizers for exploiting the young man’s condition — including involuntary use of strong language — to entertain viewers, but others saw Pete Bennett as a role model.

From the Kansas City Star:

It’s called “Tic Talk: Living with Tourette Syndrome, a 9-year-old Boy’s Story in his Own Words,’ and it’s in its second printing. Dylan Peters is ten now, but he’s still a publishing phenomenon. Next week he delivers the keynote at the 2007 National Conference of the Tourette Syndrome Foundation of Canada in Niagara Falls. He says he used to hide his disorder, but no more.