John Reed

http://easyreeder.com/home/writings/ — I haven't been able to update since COVID, but this as it stands:: http://easyreeder.com Author of A Still Small Voice (Delacorte / Delta), The Whole (Simon & Schuster / Pocket / MTV Books), the SPD bestseller, Snowball's Chance (Roof / Melville House); All The World's A Grave: A New Play By William Shakespeare (Penguin / Plume); Tales of Woe (MTV Press); Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems (C&R Press); and A Drama In Time: The New School Century (Profile Books); MFA in Creative Writing, Columbia University (fellowship); published in (selected) Artnet, the Brooklyn Rail Tin House, Paper Magazine, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Bomb Magazine, Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, the Forward, the Believer, the Rumpus, the PEN Poetry Series, the Daily Beast, Gawker, Slate, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, ElectricLit, Vice, The New York Times, Harpers; anthologized in Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin), Devouring the Green (Jaded Ibis), StoryScape Anthology V2, American Wasteland (CLMP), The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose), Vitamin PH (Phaidon), 100 Greatest Albums (VH1); Vice "Employee of the Month," Longform’s #1 Most Entertaining Essay; translated into German, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Latvian and others; works performed and screened in the United States in New York, California, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Texas, as well as internationally in Germany, India, the Netherlands and Japan; film festival distinctions have included: Merit Award (Docs without Borders), Best Feature Film (Thinking Hat Film Festival), Best Experimental Feature (Open Window Festival); Best Experimental Film & Outstanding Achievement Award (Cult Critics Film Festival); two-term board member of the National Book Critics Circle; current faculty at The New School University and The New York Arts Program.

VICE — I've come to believe that my grandmother literally poisoned those around her.

Slate — The East Village culture scene, as it developed through the late 1970s into the '80s, sought to decapitalize art. The art was taken out of the sterile, inhumane gallery/museum space and integrated into the crowded, teeming East Village: small storefronts, former tenements, and basement dance floors.

The Believer — No longer will we hang our heads in shame. We will lift our heads high, as we hang ourselves in effigy. Politics, art and culture no longer aspire to self-representation, but to shining insincerity, pixilation, the debris of our denials and our basest caprices.

Harper's Magazine — In 2001, a project of mine inflamed the Orwell estate, and I was called on for radio beatdowns. Snowball's Chance, my novella, was a parody of ; Snowball returned from his exile to bring capitalism to the farm, which of course had its own pitfalls.

The Believer — I have an impossible memory of my aunt Martha. She is in a dance studio in dancewear-the 70s-tights and solid-color cotton. I don't know if she's walking or standing or sitting-maybe, through the course of the memory, all three. I am aware of her lithe body, the sweat on her skin beading in a late [...]

VICE — January 13, 2006. It's a title fight. Light heavyweight championship, World Extreme Cagefighting. They tap gloves like friends. He dropped to 185 and even though the other guy looks denser he knows he's got heavy hands for the class.

VICE — April 4, 1889. Spring came slowly to Chicago, with a whistle of winter from the Great Lakes and the sorrow of a crop-hauler's summer. At the Olympic Theater, stagehands cranked and the curtain lifted. Hands that had chopped wood for six months-hands rough with labor and freezing rain-tipped jiggers of bourbon to scabbed lips.

VICE — February 16, 2009. It's 58 degrees in Orange County. The parking lot of the Market Place Mall is a little damp, and the man playing with the yo-yo is wearing a jumpsuit. The suit has police patches and badges-some kind of Long Beach Police Department issue-but the man isn't a police officer.

The Believer — First of all, I have to thank Daniel Levin Becker for the Sisyphean task of seeing this to publication. I know that I'm indebted to him, and to a bunch of other people at the Believer who I haven't been in direct contact with. They assidiously fact-checked everything in here, a very old-world and conscientious thing to do. My gratitude. In short, this is an Orwell essay that I rewrote in the context of Snowball's Chance, which is my parody of Animal Farm that was recently rereleased (tenth anniversary) by Melville House. And now, I'll defer to the first of 17 footnotes ...

The Paris Review — So this is a timeline I put together about Orwell's Animal Farm. I wrote it in the context of Snowball's Chance, which is my parody of Animal Farm that was recently rereleased (tenth anniversary) by Melville House. Here's the first entry...

The Paris Review — As we-like Lady Justice at her scales-weigh the virtues and policies of our presidential candidates, our very future in the balance, it is perhaps not without merit to reflect upon the classical history of democracy, and a fledging nation, now great, which has taken up a banner of representative government as passed down from the ...

The Paris Review — As we-like Lady Justice at her scales-weigh the virtues and policies of our presidential candidates, our very future in the balance, it is perhaps not without merit to reflect upon the classical history of democracy, and a fledging nation, now great, which has taken up a banner of representative government as passed down from the ...

VICE —

VICE — The cockroach was a cultural muse of the 20th century, but it's curiously absent in the 21st. We're looking at a generation of artists that didn't grow up with roaches, that don't live with them, that don't relate to them, that don't even know where to...

BOMB Magazine — Book publishing: one year, a flood of similar books about a single subject. 2010 was a big Native American year. 2011 and 2012, ebb tide. 2010 Jeffrey Ostler. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. Penguin Library of American Indian History.

The Believer — And everyday life? Meter is there too. On a long drive with the kids (5 and 8): "I was aiming onto the back porch roof; it was not going on the back porch roof"; "Duck is the one type of seafood she likes," (of pet cat); "After we have lunch, we're going fishing."

Slate — The first painting I saw upon entering " No Longer Art," a curious and elegiac exhibition at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University through Dec. 20, was a cowboy-and-Indian painting. Given that I'd just returned from my grandfather's memorial in California, it seemed fitting; one of the very few non-political arguments I'd had with my grandfather, whose aesthetics were wildly inconsistent, was about a cowboy-and-Indian painting.

The Paris Review — At what date on the calendar, at what precise location, did counterculture become pop culture? And who do we mark down in the history books as the hero, or the villain, who masterminded the switch? There is an answer: "The Times Square Show." In June of 1980, more than a hundred artists, under the auspice ...

Out Magazine — David Wojnarowicz. Two reasons you may not know that name: -our culture can't remember, can't deal with, can't fathom the angry young man; -it's too hard to spell (and pronounce). Let's deal with the second reason first. Everyone spells it wrong. Forget it.

BOMB Magazine — The child sews beanbags. "Why not make a business of it?" asks the adult. The commercial impulse is automatic. It is the channeling of art into market culture, and it is art's end. In 1969, Stuart Sherman, an artist at play, wrote a related parable (with characteristic "o-o," i.e.

The Rumpus — The Politics of Narrative The first lie: money. The second: property (and borders). The third: government. The fourth: story. Rome, Fourth century AD. Sprawling, ungovernable. Information-roads, religion-unstoppable. Government was no longer enough to manage the governed. Rome's solution: religion. Constantine's Christianity insisted that Jesus returned from the dead in body, not just in spirit.

The Brooklyn Rail — No artist is solely responsible for a work of art. Every creative work relies on cultural history, collaboration, and the creative contribution of its audience. Harold Bloom, in declining health, is the subject of discussion these days. Not always a fond subject.

The Forward — Michael Kupperman Simon and Schuster, 224 pages, $25 Michael Kupperman grew up in Connecticut, hidden away in suburbia along with a family secret; Kupperman's professor father, Joel Kupperman, had been a child star, one of the most popular and recognized child stars of his generation.