This week, the excellent CrimeReads published James’ piece on Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and The Boys from Brazil, among others. In Levin, Reich finds a kind of kindred spirit, as different as their prose style are, in a shared concern for a Freudian gothic fiction. …
Bernard Meisler, editor of Sensitive Skin magazine has compiled an anthology of some of the best writing published by the magazine since its transformation from a print-based entity to it new online form. The anthology contains Reich’s piece on Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner 2049, alongside work by Timothy …
Earlier this year, I had a phone call with David Agranoff to discuss Beyond Apollo, the classic science fiction novel by Barry Malzberg. I wrote an introduction to the 2015 reissue from Anti-Oedipus Press at the invitation of editor D. Harlan Wilson. The interview has been made available as a …
“This analysis of Lars von Trier’s beautiful Melancholia is the first episode in a series of videos based on the work I’m doing toward a book on the psychology, philosophy, and ecopsychic content of science fiction film. In this episode I talk about Melancholia through the work of Schopenhauer, Freud, …
Hemingway disclosed his secret, and committed to his definitive discourse on method, the only indispensable statement he made on writing, in 1926. The salient points of Hemingway’s style and method were contained in little more than one page. The writer seriously interested in Hemingway’s method requires only this, and likely …
These books are available from your local independent bookseller, directly from the publishers, or online. SOFT INVASIONS Anti-Oedipus Press, 2017 $12.99 Paperback $5.99 E-Book Click cover to order. “In his exceptionally well-written novel, at times lyrical, elegiac, and even mystical, James Reich asks some profound questions about time and identity. This …
The first time I read Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation (1964), I found it exhilarating. I was twenty-one, or twenty-two, and working through an obsession with Andy Warhol that had begun two years before. In a self-serving manner, I embraced Sontag’s essay; self-serving in the sense that I could use it …
“It would be fine to see you in Santa Fe & if you possibly change your mind, address is: Hotel La Fonda, Santa Fe, New Mex. for the next two weeks at least. I keep thinking about that idea we had for a couple of murders.” (Highsmith, p.47) Patricia Highsmith’s …
James Reich’s Inner Space Odyssey: Suburban Spacemen and the Cults of Catastrophe provides an account of the development of British science fiction in the 1960s, and is included in Bloomsbury Publishing’s definitive book on the fiction of the decade. The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction publishes in July 2018. From the publisher: “The …
It suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] an image—an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as …
Voigt-Kampff, the sinister test designed to detect the schizophenic ‘flattening of affect’ (33) of android psychopathy in Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/Blade Runner [i] (1968), is an extension of Alan Turing’s 1950 test of human-machine equivalence. Its purpose is to draw and cull the uncanny androids by exposing their …
Nicholas Ray’s 1955 cult classic film Rebel Without a Cause[i], starring James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo is broadly understood as a violent, tragic recapitulation of the family. It is—‘following’ abstractedly, at least in title, Robert M. Lindner’s 1944 book Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal …
UPDATE: This essay was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Thank you to Bernard Meisler at Sensitive Skin. Sensitive Skin Magazine published my essay Jack the Ripper, Performance, Participation, Fans and Trolls. The introduction is reproduced below, but you can read the full essay HERE. “During the autumn of 1888, the …
Entropy Magazine published my essay Against Recycling. The intro is below, but you can read the full work HERE: “In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, the 2012 documentary companion to his 1997 book, The Plague of Fantasies, Slovoj Žižek constellates a series of ideological vessels, from Starbucks cups, Coca Cola bottles, the Titanic, and Jaws, …
Laurence Rickels is our foremost analyst of popular culture’s repressed content, the sublimated presence of an uncanny canon of anti-classics that haunts our scene, in B-movies, in exploitation narratives, science fiction, camp, highly stylized and hysterical productions at the seam of juvenilia, trash, and high conceptual art. This methodology was …
