Snowball's Chance Tenth Anniversary with Neversink
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Melville House
An SPD all-time Bestseller.
[Reed] not only shanghais Orwell’s story, but amps up and mocks the writer’s famously flat, didactic style–that fairytailish simplicity that has ensured ANIMAL FARM a place in high school English classes for the last 50 years.
—John Strausbaugh, New York Press
Orwell’s sacred pigs get a proper roast.
—Paul Duchene, Portland Tribune
A pig returns to the farm, thumbing his snout at Orwell ... the world had a new evil to deal with, and it was not communism.
—Dinitia Smith, New York Times
SNOWBALL'S CHANCE parodies Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM, dragging it kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
—Ed Nawotka, Publisher’s Weekly
Reed has managed to take a dated masterpiece ... and revive it for the odd, casino-like social and political world we're mired in today; in the process he's created his own masterpiece.
—John Grooms, Creative Loafing, Charlotte
A volatile new novel!
—Arthur Salm, San Diego Union Tribune
The New York author has ignited a fierce literary debate; is it ever right to write a book modeled on a classic, that twists the original message into unrecognizable form?
—David Robinson and Jacqui Goddard, Scotsman
John Reed is as fearless and honest as writers come.
—Greg Dybec, Critical Mob
A swift and satisfying read, viciously funny.
—William Georgiades, New York Post
In other words: What did the victim do to deserve it?
—Cathy Young, Boston Globe
Likely to offend almost everyone. … Witless parody.
—David Futrelle, Money Magazine
It will take a great deal more than a fortnight's work by a smart-aleck anti-corporatist to undermine the most brilliant satire of the 20th century.
—London Telegraph
This unauthorized companion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a controversial parable about September 11th by one of fiction’s most inventive and provocative writers.
Written in 14 days shortly after the September 11th attacks, Snowball’s Chance is an outrageous and unauthorized answer to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which exiled pig Snowball returns to the farm, takes charge, and implements a new world order of untrammeled capitalism. Orwell’s “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” has morphed into the new rallying cry: “All animals are born equal—what they become is their own affair.”
A brilliant political satire and literary parody, John Reed’s Snowball’s Chance caused an uproar on publication in 2002, was denounced by Christopher Hitchens, and narrowly dodged a lawsuit from the Orwell estate. Now, a decade later, with America in wars on many fronts, readers can judge anew the visionary truth of Reed’s satirical masterpiece.
Snowball's Chance Teacher's Guide.
While reading SNOWBALL’S CHANCE, one plays this terrifying guessing game of animal á clef: which animal am I? Which animal is my neighbor? Which animal is my enemy? Written in lucid, wise, funny, fable-prose, this book brings to mind Spiegelman’s Maus—the use of a playful metaphor to reveal truths we might otherwise refuse to see.
—Jonathan Ames
John Reed challenges us deeply with his elegant September 11 updating of Orwell's ANIMAL FARM. It is a savage satire directed at awakening us from the long nightmare of our response to al Qaeda terrorism, and somehow manages to be entertaining along the way.
—Richard Falk
The novel transcends its particular circumstances … Snowball’s gambit is to turn the farm into a giant spectacle of happiness, and his Animal Fair represents more than just a place: it names an entire ethos.
—Craig Epplin, Guernica
As brainy as it is base, destructive as it is innovative.
—Los Angeles Review
Reed's tale, crafted amid ground zero's dust, is chilling in its clarity and inspired in its skewering of Orwell's stilted style. Whether you liked or loathed the original, there's no denying Reed has captured the state of the farm today.
—Jay Macdonald, Fort Myers News-Press
This book has something to upset almost everyone who reads it, just like a good book should.
—Dennis Loy Johnson
Reed skewers our early 21st century (edgy, tragic, absurd) with a marvelously precise wit.
—Faren Miller, Locus Magazine
Fearless, provocative, and both reverent and irreverent at the same time.
—Robert Lopez, WordRiot
One of the keenest thinkers of our time.
—Shathley Q, PopMatters
Charming but obnoxious.
—Lisa Nuch Venbrux, Popmatters
Tales of Woe (MTV Press)
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John Reed
A truly memorable and heart-wrenching book.
—Chris Arrant, Newsarama
The Grotesque is alive and well ... a dash of Rod Sterling with a touch of Alfred E. Neuman.
—Jesse Tangen-Mill, Rain Taxi
John Reed’s Tales of Woe presents a sprawling landscape of contemporary apocalyptic vistas painted in the sweeping vignette brushstrokes of a master artist’s hand. Reed, whose previous All the World’s a Grave alerted the world to a timbre of postmodern genius never before seen in American letters, cements his historical legacy with Tales of Woe.
—Rami Shamir, Evergreen Review
Naked, stark reality without resolution or justice. ... Tales of Woe violently strips the silver lining off of tragedy and presents it as it is most often experienced—without hope.
—Sean Patrick Kelly, New York Press
Fictionaut loves it LOVES IT!
Tales of Woe is epic.
—Nicolle Elizabeth, The Faster Times
Stories are so dark that they cast no light. Don’t expect happy endings here.
—Lauren Betesh, West Side Spirit
Reed, like the ancient Greeks, brings catharsis to the reader through observation of others' suffering so that we may feel better about our own lives (and relatively trivial burdens) ... Before you pick up that next horror novel, I'd suggest Tales of Woe instead, because sometimes reality is scarier than fiction.
—David Gutowski, Largeheartedboy
It feels good in my hands, heavy, shaped. Small and black, tight. Like an airport-hotel room bible, like it’s the right shape to fill in the gaps. And heavy, like it’s otherworldly, alien or improbably shriven of all need to fit into the world. Hand-made alien object, like the kind Karl Marx denigrated in Capital. —Shathley Q, Popmatters
MTV PRESS—=Crushing defeats! No happy endings! Abject misery! Pointless, endless grief! True stories of totally undeserved suffering! Spectacularly depressing! Nobody gets their just dessert!
Sin, suffering, redemption. That’s the movie, that’s the front page news, that’s the story of popular culture—of American culture. A ray of hope. A comeuppance. An all-for-the-best. Makes it easier to deal with the world’s suffering—to know that there’s a reason behind it, that it’ll always work out in the end, that people get what they deserve.
The fact: sometimes people suffer for no reason. No sin, no redemption—just suffering, suffering, suffering.
Tales of Woe compiles today’s most awful narratives of human wretchedness. This is not Hollywood catharsis (someone overcomes something and the viewer is uplifted), this is Greek Catharsis: you watch people suffer horribly, and then feel better about your own life. Tales of Woe tells stories of murder, accident, depravity, cruelty, and senseless unhappiness: and all true.
A title so appropriate to the unrelenting suffering the book details that there’s little to tell you beyond that. ... Powerful, disturbing and unforgettably painful.
—Calvin Reid, Publisher’s Weekly
Completely void of didacticism, hope, and redemption. Instead, Tales of Woe offers a parade of captivating, affronting stories that challenge and delight — er, disturb — the reader.
—Ben Mirov, Bomb Magazine
Tales of Woe is a book that will undoubtedly come define our generational zeitgeist, in it's overturning of the thrall of commercialist catharsis. ... after Friends and The X-Files, Boston Legal, House and The Corrections, reading Tales of Woe feels like a beginning, like the fertile soil of a generational nightmare has at last been properly tilled and readied for something to grow.
—Shathley Q, Popmatters
The most depressing, unbelievable, gore-soaked, abusive, disturbing and generally unacceptable stories you’ll ever hear, and they’re all TRUE! ... ugly, disturbing and unapologetic. Definite stocking-stuffer material for the nihilist on your list."
—Andy Swist, Campblood.org
So twisted and perverse, and so TRUE that even the editor of a horror blog walks away feeling a little sickened. ... Tales of Woe is nearly two hundred pages of strange and twisted tragedy without even the slightest inclination to serve up a single happy ending. It’s a sickening look at the horrors of real life from around the globe, and while I’m hesitant to recommend it, I have a feeling I pretty much just have.
—Marc Patterson, Brutal as Hell
All The World's A Grave (Plume)
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I had just decided to name my new play “A year Without Shakespeare,” to express my weariness with the recurring unimaginative return again and again to the Bard. Then I came upon John Reed’s NEW/old play, and I feel fired up! What a dramatic re-imagination is herein offered us!
—Richard Foreman
The literary Trick of the Year!
—Page 6, New York Post
I can’t quite believe “All The World’s A Grave”: Such an Original idea.
—Ian McKellen
It’s a shrewd, gutsy remix that brings the conscience of Shakespeare to our troubled times.
—Spalding Gray
The resulting story is both familiar and fresh, and the characters are energized and enlightened. Reed’s juxtaposition allows him to give added depth and dimension to characters. .. Shakespeare fans can expect classics, like Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy or Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” lament. But Shakespeare fans will have particular fun catching all the familiar Shakespeare lines that come in surprising contexts. It’s not Juliet, for instance, who cries “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, oh Romeo?”
—Scholarsandrogues
Reed skewers our early 21st century (edgy, tragic, absurd) with a marvelously precise wit.
—Faren Miller, Locus Magazine
With all the cleverness of Touchstone and the mischievousness of Puck, Reed has boldly reimagined the Bard by cutting, pasting, puzzling, and rearranging Shakespeare's own words and characters into an entirely new play. ... Reed has tapped into that muse and produced a re-envisioned Shakespeare that proves to be both provocative, substantial, and entertaining.
—Hipsterbookclub
A new and invigorating interpretation ... electrifying and comprehensive.
—Zoe Rosenthal, BatesStudent
An inspired bit of bricolage ... This “remix version” of Shakespeare proves fascinating and entertaining. Reed clearly loves the Bard. His pastiche contains many of Shakespeare’s best passages, which are always a delight to reread. More impressive, though, Reed fashions from this familiar material a story containing enough surprises to delight even those well versed in the Bard.
—Jack Helbig, Booklist
What's destabilizing—and often wildly comical—is not just the rude mash-up of characters and settings violently plucked from their canonical sources but the way in which the power of Shakespeare's language flickers uneasily, surging and hissing and fizzing out only to revive and fade again as the words play against their new contexts.
—Christianity Today, Favorite Books of 2008
We haven’t experienced this much haughtiness since college!
—Timeout New York
A proven Thomas Edison ... sophisticated fun.
—Allan Jalon, Huffington Post
Reed caramelizes the Bard’s plays into a great and terrifying world ... a dizzying feat of writing and scholarship, and uncannily contemporary in its brew of constant trouble.
—Lynne Tillman
This is the Frankenstein's monster of Shakespearean tragedy.
—William S. Niederkorn
The power of Shakespeare's language flickers uneasily, surging and hissing and fizzing out only to revive and fade again as the words play against their new contexts.
—John Wilson, Books and Culture
A wicked illusionist.
—Los Angeles Journal
PENGUIN/PLUME—
What it is: the known works of W.S., reconstructed, line by line, into a new tragedy, starring Hamlet, Juliet & Romeo, Iago, Macbeth, The Queen, Three Weird Sisters, Rosencrantz & Guidenstern, and the Ghost of the King.
The story: Hamlet goes to war for Juliet, the daughter of King Lear. Having captured his bride—by unnecessary bloodshed—Prince Hamlet returns home to find that his mother has murdered his father and married Macbeth. Hamlet, wounded and reeling, is sought out by the ghost of his murdered further, and commanded to seek revenge. Iago, opportunistic, further inflames the enraged Prince, persuading him that Juliet is having an affair with Romeo; the Prince goes mad with jealousy.
The issues engendered: War, parody, the question of what is authorship, sex and exploitation, the current Shakespeare fracas, the long history of Shakespeare adaptations, Shakespeare and Hollywood, the Public Domain, the literary canon, the state of contemporary letters in relation to “great” works, the creative future we bequeath our children.
SCENES FOR ACTORS
Hamlet monologue—Act 1, Scene II
Juliet & Hamlet—Act 1, Scene IV
Lear monologue—Act 3, Scene II
Macbeth & Witches—Act 4, Scene VI, or excerpted by the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/10/fiction/an-excerpt-from-john-reeds-new-book-all-the-worlds-a-grave
Queen & Macbeth—Act 4, Scene VII
Queen monologue—Act 4, Scene VII
ENDNOTES
The endnotes are organized by act and line number, as keyed to the Penguin/Plume edition. They reference the provenance of each line, notable meter, and scene locations. (Please email questions or comments on the footnotes.) Many thanks to Ken Murray for transferring these to a practical document.
THE QUARTOS
There are currently four quarto versions, cut for the stage. Lengths (at 10,000 words per hour):
5,000 words: selection
8,000 words: selection
14,400 words: Quarto 3
17,400 words: Quarto 1 (10,000 words shorter than the Penguin/Plume edition).
SYLLABUS
Course description: Shakespeare in our day. What draws us to Shakespeare? What draws us to a language and society far from our own? That Shakespeare can be a riveting stage force is demonstrated time and again, from the most humble small town production to New York’s Broadway. But where is our time in the world of Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear and Henry V? What characters come away from those plays to deliver a message to the contemporary world? And what do they say? In this course, we’ll read six plays by William Shakespeare (as named above) and view theatrical and cinematic performances. All The World’s A Grave: a New Play by William Shakespeare (Penguin Books 2008) by contemporary author, John Reed, will serve as our gateway, back to Shakespeare’s time, and then, back to our own. Course requirements: memorization of one Shakespeare Sonnet, one in-class presentation, and a final paper.
Please email requests for the syllabus, endnotes or Quartos, and queries regarding rights, to john[@]johnreed.org
Reed has brought music's remix culture to literature with stunning results.
—David Gutowski, largeheartedboy
All the World’s a Grave alerted the world to a timbre of postmodern genius never before seen in American letters.
—Rami Shamir, Evergreen Review
This send-up of the bard is both new yet familiar; by using a literary form of montage, Reed plays with our understanding of some of the best known characters from Shakespeare's oeuvre and creates a work that is eerie in its timeliness.
—Finn Harvor, Rain Taxi
Reed has managed to take a dated masterpiece ... and revive it for the odd, casino-like social and political world we're mired in today; in the process he's created his own masterpiece.
—John Grooms, Creative Loafing, Charlotte
The language is Shakespeare's, but the drama that unfolds is as fresh as the blood on the stage.
—Fictionwise
The Whole (MTV Books)
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John Reed
Well-done, MTV, for publishing this terrific skewering of … MTV.
—William Georgiades, New York Post
A caustically brilliant satire ... as brainy as it is base, destructive as it is innovative and sweeping as it is sophisticated.
—Graham Reed, Los Angeles Journal
Philip K. Dick got nuthin on John Reed!
—Laura Albert / J.T. Leroy
Charming but obnoxious.
—Lisa Nuch Venbrux, Popmatters
Satire at its most inventive and buoyant. ... It would have made Boris Vian grin and Lewis Carroll blush.
—Donald Breckenridge, Brooklyn Rail
MTV BOOKS—
In the middle of America's heartland, a young boy digs a small hole in the ground … which grows into a big hole in the ground … which then proceeds to drag the boy, his parents, his dog, and most of their house into a dark void. Then, as abruptly as it started, it stops.
So begins the first in a series of bizarre events that take the beautiful-if-not-brainy Thing on a quest to uncover the truth behind the mysterious hole. Inspired by visions, signs, and an unlimited supply of pink cocktails served by an ever-lurking, mysterious "Black Rabbit," Thing and her dogged production crew travel around America—encountering Satanists, an Extraterrestrial/Christian support group, and a surprisingly helpful phone psychic—on a search for answers that could very well decide the fate of the world as they know it.
But the more Thing learns about the hole, her shocking connection to it, and the mind-boggling destiny that awaits her, the more she thinks that maybe human civilization isn't all it's cracked up to be—and that maybe it's about time to start over…
Snowball's Chance (Roof Books)
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John Reed
An SPD all-time Bestseller.
[Reed] not only shanghais Orwell’s story, but amps up and mocks the writer’s famously flat, didactic style–that fairytailish simplicity that has ensured ANIMAL FARM a place in high school English classes for the last 50 years.
—John Strausbaugh, New York Press
Orwell’s sacred pigs get a proper roast.
—Paul Duchene, Portland Tribune
A pig returns to the farm, thumbing his snout at Orwell ... the world had a new evil to deal with, and it was not communism.
—Dinitia Smith, New York Times
SNOWBALL'S CHANCE parodies Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM, dragging it kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
—Ed Nawotka, Publisher’s Weekly
Reed has managed to take a dated masterpiece ... and revive it for the odd, casino-like social and political world we're mired in today; in the process he's created his own masterpiece.
—John Grooms, Creative Loafing, Charlotte
A volatile new novel!
—Arthur Salm, San Diego Union Tribune
The New York author has ignited a fierce literary debate; is it ever right to write a book modeled on a classic, that twists the original message into unrecognizable form?
—David Robinson and Jacqui Goddard, Scotsman
John Reed is as fearless and honest as writers come.
—Greg Dybec, Critical Mob
A swift and satisfying read, viciously funny.
—William Georgiades, New York Post
In other words: What did the victim do to deserve it?
—Cathy Young, Boston Globe
Likely to offend almost everyone. … Witless parody.
—David Futrelle, Money Magazine
It will take a great deal more than a fortnight's work by a smart-aleck anti-corporatist to undermine the most brilliant satire of the 20th century.
—London Telegraph
ROOF BOOKS—
Snowball's Chance is a wildly scathing, landmark novel by New York author John Reed. Written in lower Manhattan, near Ground Zero, in the three weeks following September 11, Reed's story is surprisingly populated, not by Americans and Islamists, but by a motley array of farm and woodland animals who act out American history and its fallout. Reed's novel addresses the events of last year concisely and precisely to target the follies of today's entrepreneurs and religionists alike.
George Orwell's Animal Farm told a wry and sardonic fable of communism in a dystopic collective farm. Snowball's Chance parodies Orwell by firing a broadside at the casino economy and the culture of the good life. In a brilliantly conceived and executed riposte to the marketplace's unthinking cheerleaders, Reed's Snowball, the Pig ousted from the Animal Farm for rationality, returns to bring marketeering to the farm.
At first Snowball's regime prospers: heated stalls, running water, and a window for each animal. The farm moves away from its agricultural roots as Snowball and his team of educated Goats recreate Animal Farm as Animal Fair, replete with citizen performers and criminal sideshows.
With clarity, style, and humor, Reed takes on the legacy of Orwell's famous novel and the boardrooms of the transnational corporations. In doing so he spins a book that is witty, readable, and better targeted than a "precision" bomb. Continuing a tradition which extends from Aesop to Art Spiegelman, Snowball's Chance uses a playful fiction to ask very serious and often dangerous questions.
While reading SNOWBALL’S CHANCE, one plays this terrifying guessing game of animal á clef: which animal am I? Which animal is my neighbor? Which animal is my enemy? Written in lucid, wise, funny, fable-prose, this book brings to mind Spiegelman’s Maus—the use of a playful metaphor to reveal truths we might otherwise refuse to see.
—Jonathan Ames
John Reed challenges us deeply with his elegant September 11 updating of Orwell's ANIMAL FARM. It is a savage satire directed at awakening us from the long nightmare of our response to al Qaeda terrorism, and somehow manages to be entertaining along the way.
—Richard Falk
The novel transcends its particular circumstances … Snowball’s gambit is to turn the farm into a giant spectacle of happiness, and his Animal Fair represents more than just a place: it names an entire ethos.
—Craig Epplin, Guernica
As brainy as it is base, destructive as it is innovative.
—Los Angeles Review
Reed's tale, crafted amid ground zero's dust, is chilling in its clarity and inspired in its skewering of Orwell's stilted style. Whether you liked or loathed the original, there's no denying Reed has captured the state of the farm today.
—Jay Macdonald, Fort Myers News-Press
This book has something to upset almost everyone who reads it, just like a good book should.
—Dennis Loy Johnson
Reed skewers our early 21st century (edgy, tragic, absurd) with a marvelously precise wit.
—Faren Miller, Locus Magazine
Fearless, provocative, and both reverent and irreverent at the same time.
—Robert Lopez, WordRiot
One of the keenest thinkers of our time.
—Shathley Q, PopMatters
Charming but obnoxious.
—Lisa Nuch Venbrux, Popmatters
A Still Small Voice (Delacorte)
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John Reed
A STILL SMALL VOICE is a beautiful and poignant novel. It lives in the details, which are so vividly and authentically right that they become part of our own personal experience ... our own memory. —Jack Dann
John Reed’s prose style is a heady mix of restraint and exuberance. In A STILL SMALL VOICE, Reed combines the attentiveness of a naturalist, the factual accuracy of an historian, and the compassion of, well, a really good novelist.
—Matthew Sharpe
With gorgeous writing and a powerful sense of history, John Reed makes a stunning debut. You'll fall into this remarkable novel from the first sentence. Reed is a heartthrob of a writer, and A STILL SMALL VOICE shines with his passion.
—Molly Peacock
First-time novelist Reed leads us poetically through ... two decades, setting vivid details of the Civil War against the passions of a girl saying goodbye.
—Glamour
Truly magnificent.
—Randall W. Allred, Civil War Book Review
DELACORTE—
Written with a storyteller's grace and a poet's touch, John Reed's powerful first novel is a true adventure of the heart—at once a passionate love story and a sweeping historical saga set against a vivid backdrop of the Civil War....
The year is 1859 as seven-year-old Alma Flynt arrives in the Kentucky town of Cotterpin Creek to begin a new life. There, Alma will have as friends, neighbors, and benefactors the magnificent Cleveland family.
With their sprawling mansion and gleaming thoroughbred horses, the Clevelands are a wonder. But from the beginning, one Cleveland draws all of Alma's attention: the youngest son, John Warren.
Alma knew they were meant for each other from their first meeting. But everything changes as war descends on Cotterpin Creek, taking John Warren to battle and sweeping his family into the chaos.
Against this turbulent backdrop, Alma will come of age. And when the fighting is over, the story of a brave young man riding off to battle becomes a haunting journey of vengeance and redemption. And for Alma, yet another journey begins on the day a tormented young soldier staggers back into her life.
John Reed has woven a historical novel about hope and love that is touchingly told; A STILL SMALL VOICE verifies that if one has true faith in what one desires, anything is possible.
—Suzan Sherman, Bomb Magazine
Reed shows real brilliance.
—Niel Chethik, Lexington Herald-Leader
Readers who enjoy an in-depth look at society during the Civil War will delight in John Reed’s A STILL SMALL VOICE. The story is filled with insightful tidbits and an interesting perspective of life in a border town. … An incredible historical character study.
—Harriet Klausner
American Wasteland (CLMP)
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American Wasteland: Bleak Tales of the Future on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11
Delphine Pontvieux, Ray Charbonneau, Mark R. Brand, Lawrence Santoro, John Reed, Matthew Christman
edited by Jason Pettus
CCLaP—
With all the talk of "hope" and "honor" that was bound to arise during the tenth anniversary of September 11th, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography thought it was important to also remind the future of what the last ten years have REALLY been like. That's why the center put together this latest anthology, which took a dark science-fiction conceit as its core and then invited a series of writers across the nation to pen stories set within that alternative universe. In this case, the stories (by Ray Charbonneau, Delphine Pontvieux, John Reed, Matthew Christman, Mark R. Brand and Lawrence Santoro) look back from a fictional twentieth anniversary of 9/11, but one where John McCain won the 2008 and '12 elections, then Sarah Palin in 2016 and '20; and with no government bailouts, no withdrawals from the Middle East, and no attempts to move away from an oil-based economy, the US has become a much bleaker and more terrible place, a nation that is now used to rolling electricity blackouts two or three days a week and that is just about to go to war with Mexico, where the permanently unemployed squat in half-finished McMansions out in crumbling suburbs that almost completely lack both gasoline and fresh fruit. A sobering reminder of what life under Tea Party rule would likely be like, "American Wasteland" is an antidote to the false cheeriness and optimism that has come with the tenth anniversary of 9/11, a more realistic look at all the mistakes this nation has made between then and now.
The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose)
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The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology
Hanging Loose Press
edited by Donald Breckenridge
Here is a welcome anthology of inventive fictions by celebrated practitioners - Williams, Daitch, Evenson, Marton - and newer writers deserving celebration.
—Christine Schutt
HANGING LOOSE—
The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology features writing by: Diane Williams, Brian Evenson, Caila Rossi, Lynda Schor, John Yau, Barbara Henning, Michael Martone, Jacques Roubaud (translated by Guy Bennet), Susan Daitch, Jim Feast, Martha King, Lynn Crawford, Lewis Warsh, Pat MacEnulty, Will Fleming, Carmen Firan (translated by Dorin Motz), Bart Cameron, Constanza Jaramillo Cathcart, Aaron Zimmerman, Sharon Mesmer, Jeremy Sigler, Jill Magi, Blake Radcliffe, Meredith Brosnan, Evan Harris, Douglas Glover, Johannah Rogers, Jonathan Baumbach, Marie Carter, Doug Nufer, Leslie Scalapino, Robert Pinget (translated by Barbara Wright), Elizabeth Reddin, Kenneth Bernard, Jean Frémon (translated by Brian Evanson), R. M. Berry, Thomas D'Adamo, Albert Mobilio, John Reed, and Kurt Strahm.
Donald Breckenridge's anthology brings together a brilliant collection of writers, recent, new, and newest. It's a bewilderingly impressive achievement. —Harry Mathews
Here is a welcome anthology of inventive fictions by celebrated practitioners - Williams, Daitch, Evenson, Marton - and newer writers deserving celebration. —Christine Schutt
Vitamin PH (Phaidon)
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Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography
T.J. Demos and Editors of Phaidon Press
Including 121 artists from 40 different countries as selected by 79 curators, critics and established artists, Vitamin Ph includes the following artists:
Armando Andrade Tudela, Alexander Apostól, Miriam Bäckström, Yto Barrada, Erica Baum, Valérie Belin, Walead Beshty, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Frank Breuer, Olaf Breuning, Gerard Byrne, Elinor Carucci, David Claerbout, Anne Collier, Phil Collins, Kelli Connell, Eduardo Consuegra, Sharon Core, Rochelle Costi, Gregory Crewdson, Nancy Davenport, Tim Davis, Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson, Hans Eijkelboom, JH Engström, Lalla Essaydi, Roe Ethridge, Peter Fraser, Yang Fudong, Anna Gaskell, Simryn Gill, Anthony Goicolea, Geert Goiris, David Goldblatt, Katy Grannan, AES+F group, The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Mauricio Guillen, Jitka Hanzlová, Anne Hardy, Rachel Harrison, Jonathan Hernández, Sarah Hobbs, Emily Jacir, Valérie Jouve, Yeondoo Jung, Rinko Kawauchi, Annette Kelm, Idris Khan, Joachim Koester, Panos Kokkinias, Luisa Lambri, An-My Lê, Tim Lee, Nikki S Lee, Zoe Leonard, Armin Linke, Sharon Lockhart, Vera Lutter, Florian Maier-Aichen, Malerie Marder, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Gareth McConnell, Scott McFarland, Ryan McGinley, Trish Morrissey, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Zanele Muholi, Oliver Musovik, Kelly Nipper, Nils Norman, Catherine Opie, Esteban Pastorino Díaz, Paul Pfeiffer, Sarah Pickering, Peter Piller, Rosângela Rennó, Mauro Restiffe, Robin Rhode, Sophy Rickett, Noguchi Rika, Andrea Robbins/Max Becher, Ricarda Roggan, Anri Sala, Dean Sameshima, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Markus Schinwald, Gregor Schneider, Collier Schorr, Josef Schulz, Paul Shambroom, Ahlam Shibli, Yinka Shonibare, Efrat Shvily, Santiago Sierra, Paul Sietsema, Alex Slade, Sean Snyder, Alec Soth, Heidi Specker, Hannah Starkey, Simon Starling, John Stezaker, Clare Strand, Darren Sylvester, Guy Tillim, Nazif Topçuoglu, Danny Treacy, Fatimah Tuggar, Céline van Balen, Annika von Hausswolff, Bettina von Zwehl, Deborah Willis, Sharon Ya'ari, Catherine Yass, Shizuka Yokomizo, Amir Zaki, Liu Zheng, Tobias Zielony
With and introduction by TJ Demos and individual texts about the artists by Rodrigo Alonso, Thomas Boutoux, Isolde Brielmaier, Stuart Comer, Dina Deitsch, TJ Demos, Frits Giertsberg, Mark Godfrey, Catherine Grant, Alison Green, Katerina Gregos, Rachel Haidu, Jens Hoffmann, Michael Ned Holte, Ana Finel Honigman, Vincent Honoré, Vasif Kortun, Sarah Lewis, Roxana Marcoci, Dominic Molon, Shamim M Momin, Jessica Morgan, Jonathan Napack, Sally O'Reilly, Tetsuya Ozaki, Bethany Pappalardo, Alona Pardo, John Reed, Catsou Roberts, Jose Roca, Barry Schwabsky, Brian Sholis, Luke Skrebowski, Kerstin Stremmel, Margaret Sundell, Gloria Sutton, Nato Thompson, Sarah Thornton, Grant Watson, Axel Wieder
PHAIDON PRESS—
The Definitive Book on Photography Today; Featuring 121 Artists from Over 30 Countries.
The life of an artistic medium lies in the capricious nature of the contemporary art market. Even the heavy-hitters - painting, sculpture and drawing - have fallen victim to this ebb and flow; declared dead one moment, only to be resurrected the next. Now it is photography's turn to contemplate its fate atop this precarious fence. Does it fall backward and play into the taunts that call photography an "obsolete" medium, so stretched and manipulated by its collaborations with other practices that it is rendered indefinable? Or, inspired by globalization, does it jump forward into distinction, with practitioners resuscitating the traditional form of the documentary image?
VITAMIN Ph: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN PHOTOGRAPHY, with an introduction by TJ Demos, is the definitive book on photography in the contemporary art world today. VITAMIN Ph is a global survey of new developments in the medium of photography, featuring 121 living artists who have made a contribution to the international art photography scene in the last five years.
In VITAMIN Ph, the featured artists are presented in A to Z order. For each artist, approximately five selections of work are reproduced alongside text by a critic who is a specialist on the artist's career. The surveys cover the artists' careers to date and explain the methods and subject matter featured in recent works.
Whether the style is documentary, deadpan, abstract, or portraiture; no matter that the artists are sculptors, video artists, painters, and photography has become a vital part of contemporary art. VITAMIN Ph is the only book of its kind to illustrate the up-to-the-minute complexity, variety and global spectrum of photography today.
The book follows the similar concept, scope and structure to Phaidon's successful volumes Vitamin P (2002), for painting, and Vitamin D (2005), for drawing.
- A global, up-to-the-minute survey of new developments in contemporary photography
- Features the work of 121 living photographers who have made a fresh and innovative contribution to international art photography in the last five years, nominated by influential critics, curators and artists from around the world
- Approximately 500 images depict the rich variety and current trends in the medium
- Texts by significant critics, curators, art historians and creative writers representing a wide variety of perspectives
- Both a reference for the art world and an accessible guide for those with an interest in photography at all levels
100 Greatest Albums (VH1)
order from Amazon
edited by Jacob Hoye
with contributions from Harlan Coban, John Reed, Michael J. Garvey, Joe S. Harrington, Stuart Cohn, Raquel Bruno, and David P. Galuski
VH1—
VH1's 100 Greatest Albums television series sparked much debate about the accuracy of its list, but it was a great guide for any serious or casual music fan as to which albums should be staples in any record collection. As a book, the 100 Greatest Albums will be the perfect reference for building a substantive and thorough collection, as well as just being an entertaining read about some of the most important works ever created in music history. The book follows the order of the list, starting at 100 and working towards number one. Each album is discussed thoroughly across a two-page spread and each spread will include; an image of the album cover, the year of release, the record label, production and engineering credits, band members and instruments played, appropriate quote or quotes about the album from other artists, an essay that gives context to the album by examining its historical significance and detailing what makes the album unique by diving into the songs.