John Reed has recently published The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, and the Origin of Animal Farm.
In The Never End, John Reed collects two decades of subject-Orwell findings previously published in PANK, Guernica, Literary Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The New York Press, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, and The Paris Review. Reed views Orwell in a twenty-first century global context, considering Orwell’s collaboration with Cold War intelligence operations in the U.S. and UK with unfaltering objectivity and a corrective and peerlessly contemporary lens. The Never End is at once a hatchet job and a celebration. It’s hard to imagine that Orwell—in our own moment of global doublethink—wouldn’t have wanted his devotion to contrariety applied to the literary legacy he left behind.
Reed’s perspective on Orwell has already garnered extensive praise from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Guernica, and Popmatters.
“John Reed challenges us deeply with his elegant September 11 updating of Orwell’s Animal Farm.” —Richard Falk, professor at Princeton University.
“Some books double as a matchstick: if struck in the right conditions, they can cause a wildfire.” —The Rumpus
“Reed skewers our early twenty-first century (edgy, tragic, absurd) with a marvelously precise wit.” —Locus Magazine
“John Reed has been writing hard-to-classify books for over a decade, to great acclaim and sometimes greater notoriety.” —Bomb Magazine
John grew up in the shadow of the Towers, born to prominent downtown artists Judy Rifka and David Reed. John is an American novelist who wrote “A Still Small Voice,” “Snowball’s Chance” with a preface by Alexander Cockburn, “All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare,” “The Whole,” “Tales of Woe,” “Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems,” “A Drama In Time: The New School Century,” and “The Family Dolls: A Manson Paper + Play Book.” He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. His work has been widely published in journals including ElectricLit, the Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, Paper Magazine, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Bomb Magazine, Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, the Believer, the Rumpus, Observer, the PEN Poetry Series, the Daily Beast, Gawker, Slate, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, Vice, The New York Times, Harpers, and Rolling Stone, and anthologized in Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin). HIs works have been translated and performed worldwide, and his films have been distinguished at festivals internationally. A two-term board member of the National Book Critics Circle, he is currently Associate Professor and Director in the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.
Order a copy of “The Never End” here.