It’s ninety years since André Breton — re Surrealism and the extravagant possibilities of ‘marvelous’ literature — wrote: “At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy tales. No matter how charming they …
Glenn Branca and the Lost History of Cyberpunk James Reich, Published by Fiction Advocate, May 29, 2014 I first connected to the Internet in 1998. There was nothing hip about it, no mirrorshades, no chilled Kirin, no hacker’s cant, no rude-boy antagonism against the frozen walls of malefic corporations, but …
ON THE BEACH – Dali, Ballard, Neil Young and Cadillac Ranch James Reich, First Published by The End Of Being, August 21, 2011. The warped pataphysical pocket watches of Salvador Dali’s small canvas The Persistence of Memory continued to mark molecular time from 1931 until the spring of 1974, when their position …
H.P. Lovecraft, Herbert West: Reanimator, and Boxing James Reich April 25th, 2014 Of the grotesqueries depicted in Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator, beyond the ambivalent reclamation by the Anglo-Saxon war dead of Herbert West the Aryan “scientific automaton”, the “ice-cold intellectual machine”, the most appalling is the appearance of …
FREUD: THE PENULTIMATE BIOGRAPHY by D. Harlan Wilson, Reviewed by James Reich April 10th, 2014 Ceci n’est pas une livre… This is not a book. It is an algorithm. D. Harlan Wilson’s trilogy of Hitler: The Terminal Biography; Freud: The Penultimate Biography; and Douglass: The Lost Autobiography are Magrittesque artifacts. Certainly not biographies in the conventional …
JAMES REICH: BOMB-BLASTING THROUGH THE AGE OF NUCLEAR FOLLY: Interview by Frank Browning February 5th, 2014 Valerie Solanas plainly made a deep impact on the English novelist as he was constructing his blindingly brilliant and horrifyingly comic novel, Bombshell, a road story framed around a fictive lover and devotee of …
FICTION ADVOCATE February 1st, 1014 Two hundred years ago, in the spring of 1814, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin began her romance with Percy Bysshe Shelley—a romance shadowed by dreadful mortality, but which birthed Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus in 1818. February 1st is the anniversary of her death in 1851. The name Frankenstein as a unit …
INTERNATIONAL TIMES: Malcolm Mc Neill interviewed by James Reich January 23rd, 2014 In February 2014, William S. Burroughs will not be 100 years old; like Ronald Reagan before him, he will be dead. The fingernails will have trailed out a little further and the hair may test subtly at the …
THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN – Frank Browning interviewed by James Reich January 22nd, 2014 To read Frank Browning’s latest book The Monk and the Skeptic: Dialogues on Sex, Faith, and Religion is to eavesdrop on series of confessionals, and to be party to the converse positions and erotic agreements of Browning and Brother …
SPECTRE BY LAURENCE A. RICKELS, Reviewed by James Reich December 19th, 2013 Laurence A. Rickels, The Man With The Golden Pun, has turned his cryptic genius on the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming, specifically the occult, neurotic currents flowing beneath those works where 007 battles SPECTRE, headed—baldly—by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. …
50 REASONS WE’RE THANKFUL WE’RE GAY LADIES 2013 (#6) November 26th, 2013 Bombshell: A Novel is included with Bodies of Water by T. Greenwood, and We Are Water by Wally Lamb in After Ellen‘s 2013 list of “50 Reasons We’re Thankful We’re Gay Ladies” at number 6. What a fantastic pleasure to be included in such an illustrious …
THREE GUYS ONE BOOK Bombshell: A Novel Reviewed by Benjamin Rybeck October 10th, 2013 “So many great “Avantpop” works—Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope, Jonathan Lethem’s early genre novels, most everything by Kathy Acker—are hanging out, waiting for adventurous oddball filmmakers to adapt them, bringing delightful visions of an American wasteland to silver screens everywhere! Bombshell, a novel by …
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW SHORTLIST: International Thrillers September 15th, 2013 In addition to a recent pick by Ms. Magazine, Bombshell is featured in the New York Times Book Review ‘Shortlist’ of International Thrillers. “Somewhere between the macho-hipster fantasies of Quentin Tarantino and the banshee-activist theatrics of Pussy Riot dwells Varyushka Cash…Now that’s entertainment.” – New …
BLACKHEART MAGAZINE Review by Kristen Valentine August 13th, 2013 “…A violent, blistering literary thriller with twists and thrills and plenty of complex characterizations. James Reich has created an entirely new kind of anti-heroine in Varyushka Cash – she’s both dangerous and sympathetic, a methodical killer on a quest for the greater good, and …
Dropping a Bombshell: Thriller author explodes nuclear tourism and genre archetypes – James Reich interviewed by Brianna Stallings. (Photo by Eric Williams) August 1st, 2013 “Finding myself in New Mexico, cradle of the Bomb, is a kind of necessary existential perversity,” Reich said. “I love New Mexico, but in terms of Bombshell, that violent …
KQED ARTS – Bombshell: A Novel Reviewed by Ingrid Rojas Contreras July 29th, 2013 “When hunting for a summer read, the obvious thing to look for is explosions. Explosions and something a little sexy, a little decadent, a little radical. Moving cars, motels, an impossible goal, down-and-out characters. James Reich’s Bombshell is all of …
THE RUMPUS: Bombshell, A Novel reviewed by Nick De Pascal July 15th, 2013 “Bombshell, James Reich’s second novel, is an incredibly dense, rich, and well-paced novel. Within its 259 pages the reader encounters Chernobyl, feminism, terrorism, rendition, Valerie Solanas, Jane Fonda, Hiroshima, the Trinity test site, and much more. In the hands …
“Reich’s novel is chock full of explosive ideas conveyed with radioactive prose. His heroine Varyushka Cash makes Lisbeth Salander look like a dimwitted Mary Poppins. This is dangerous fiction – handle with extreme caution.” —Isaac Adamson, Edgar Award Finalist, Complication “Bombshell is great stuff, and James Reich writes like a demon. He …