Shortly after the publication of The Moth for the Star, James Reich was interviewed by writer Jordan Rothacker whose latest science fiction The Shrieking of Nothing is published by Spacebar Books. They discuss the darker sides of modernism, music for writing, and the possibility of becoming persona non grata. Here is a brief extract, beginning with Rothacker’s introduction, but you can read the original interview in full at Stat®Rec.
This is the second time I’ve interviewed James Reich, and it is good to catch up with him after the publication of his newest novel, The Moth for the Star, released in late 2023 from 7.13 Books. This haunting and masterful novel takes the reader right into the heart of “dark Modernism,” a territory very familiar to Reich as his 2016 work from Anti-Oedipus Press, Mistah Kurtz, was staged as a prequel to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The Moth for the Star is a mystery spanning the 1920s and ’30s, across geographies of New York City, Venice, and Cairo, while the protagonists, Varnas and Campbell, are locked in a metaphysical struggle of guilt and deliverance. Reich’s magical prose twists, tricks, and lures the reader into a world that is at once terrifying and oh so seductive.
Jordan A. Rothacker: Your new novel was published by 7.13 Books. As our audience might know, you yourself are a publisher and run Stalking Horse Press, a wonderful small press that has done some really great books. And so my question is: why not just publish yourself? This is your third novel since you started Stalking Horse, so it’s obviously not a random situation. There are several notable presses who publish their own staff.
James Reich: The critical distance is important, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have people who want to publish my work. I just haven’t had to, except that I chose to have Stalking Horse publish my limited-edition poetry collection, The Holly King. That was more a question of time and controlling the print run—and it was of a moment, something almost commemorative that didn’t need to be tied up in submissions for years. Traditional, “big house” publishing is self-immolating, purging itself. So, self-publishing is going to be the dominant mode at some point, but it will be horribly consolidated through Amazon. By then AI will have utterly destroyed culture, and then we’ll be hanging at the rim of extinction. So, there’s that. . . READ MORE…