James Reich's Blog

James Reich will be at the Henry Miller in the 21st Century Conference delivering a paper on Henry Miller, Wilhelm Reich, and ‘The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy.’ The conference is held at the Asilomar Hotel and takes in both Pacific Grove and Big Sur via the Henry Miller Memorial Library. The paper discusses the nexus of Miller and Wilhelm Reich via Mildred E. Brady’s 1947 Harper’s article “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy” and more… The keynote speaker is Mary Dearborn, acclaimed biographer of Mi...

On Saturday, October 11th, James Reich will be one of the writers appearing at the Santa Fe Noir Festival, to be held in the Grand Ballroom of the historic La Fonda Hotel on the Plaza. The event includes a selection of Santa Fe authors who contributed to the Santa Fe Noir anthology published by Akashic Books in 2020. The anthology includes Reich’s “Me and Say Dog” which was originally written for the anthology and also included in his picaresque science fiction novel The Song My Enemies Sing. T...

Finalists for the 2024 Big Other Literary Awards have been announced and James Reich’s Skinship is nominated for Best Fiction and for the Readers’ Choice awards. Both categories include a stellar line-up of authors, so do please check those writers out also, and subscribe to Big Other to support their work. Thank you to the various judges involved in making Skinship a finalist!

James Reich’s 2024 monograph on Wilhelm Reich is one of the 2024’s Notable Books chosen by the Ancillary Review of Books:

Wilhelm Reich versus The Flying Saucers meticulously explores the controversial psychologist’s last years, which are usually known as his “meltdown”, trying to find a rationale in Reich’s seemingly erratic behavior. Using a vivid style that really brings Reich to life, the author (no family relation) paints a careful and measured description of Reich’s use of the “weather cann...

“James Reich is an author who defies most standard genre conventions. While he doesn’t have the literary reputation of Brian Evenson or Margaret Atwood, James Reich is writing some of the best Science Fiction in the underground indie movement […] It is a deep ecological novel that combines genuine body horror with beautifully written prose. A story that mines the trauma everyone with open eyes should feel when facing a warming dying ecosystem. It deserves a place in the great canon of Generation...

James Reich’s new science fiction novel, the brooding Skinship (Anti-Oedipus Press, December, 2024) has received a rave review from the esoteric journal We the Hallowed. Eric Millar provides an excellent spoiler-free preview of the novel. Here are a few extracts:

I could easily see Skinship placed in an old spinner rack next to Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron or Michael Moorcock’s Behold The Man. It reads and feels vintage in its brief length and pulpy premise but deftly carries a contemporary s...

Stat®Rec recently published a wonderfully erudite and precise review by John Mirkovic of The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books). An extract is re-published below, but please visit the original site for the full review, linked below. Mirkovic’s review opens:

In The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, the urban sub-chaos softly closes with the image of the Arthurian Fisher King, sitting upon the shore, waiting for his chosen successor, wondering “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” In his slim yet cinemati...

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...

Available to pre-order now, Anti-Oedipus Press will publish James Reich’s eerie science fiction novel Skinship on December 15th, 2024. Artwork was provided by Matthew Revert, and the editor is D. Harlan Wilson, founder of AOP. From the publisher’s website:

Bearing the final remnants of humanity and its genetic archive, the last Skinship to leave a dying, distant-future Earth closes in on the Dragonhead Nebula and the prospect planet that offers resurrection. With Applewhite, the First Navigator,...

With great pleasure, we announce the publication of Wilhelm Reich versus The Flying Saucers (puntum/brainstorm books)! James Reich’s psychoanalytic monograph is the first to examine Reich’s relationship with flying saucer, UFO, or Ea phenomena constellated specifically with Reich’s “cinematic self.” From the publisher:

The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he “lost his mind” in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work — the orgone and radiation...