John Reed reconstructs the works of William Shakespeare into a new five-act tragedy. The language is Shakespeare's, but the drama that unfolds is as fresh as the blood on the stage.

John Reed, All the World's a Grave: A New Play

by William Shakespeare, Plume, 2008.

An epic tragedy of love, war, murder, and madness, plucked from the pages of Shakespeare

In All the World's a Grave, John Reed reconstructs the works of William Shakespeare into a new five-act tragedy. The language is Shakespeare's, but the drama that unfolds is as fresh as the blood on the stage.

Prince Hamlet goes to war for Juliet, the daughter of King Lear. Having captured Juliet as his bride--by reckless war--he returns home to find that his mother has murdered his father and married Macbeth. Enter Iago, who persuades Hamlet that Juliet is having an affair with Romeo. As the Prince goes mad with jealousy, King Lear mounts his army. . .

This play promises to be the most provocative and entertaining work to be added to the Shakespeare canon since Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

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.

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

In All The World’s A Grave, Reed is a director, an orchestrator, and an assembler taking what was present to work with, and making one brand new Reed/Shakespeare partnership play. He says it’s a Shakespeare play, but really it’s a Reed. How could it not be? Reed does to Shakespeare what Shakespeare did to himself. However, this is part of his big question, his radical literary populism, asking where is the author now, where lies the genius ? ... It is at once an act of homage and conquest. —Jordan A. Rothacker, The Believer

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

An absolute feast of Shakespeare remixed, reborn, and given a freshness I didn't expect--and it's somehow seamless in the re-appropriation for this new narrative. —Sustainable Arts Foundation

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. It raises the Artistotelian emotions of pity and fear to a new level as the audience agonizes over the uncertainty of which catharsis John Reed's play is heading toward. —William S. Niederkorn

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

The language is Shakespeare's, but the drama that unfolds is as fresh as the blood on the stage. —Fictionwise

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

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

ReVO: a media play by John Reed

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/easyreeder/revo-a-media-play-by-john-reed

An American-based terrorist group deploys their weapon of war: a terminal STD. Drama/ultra-black comedy. Shot & set in NYC. 2014/2015.

Future now.

With their leaders facing charges of property crime, the Students for a Democratic Society have splintered and gone underground. Their radical new protest now verges on terrorism. Weapon of choice? RVO, a bio-engineered, lethal, sexually transmitted disease. Delivery method? Fuck the man. Targets? In the ego-soaked, oversexed parade of Manhattan's self-identified petty elite, who can be sure?

In the spirit of New York's No Wave movement of the ’80s, ReVO restores a vision of the chaotic, ugly, solipsistic city altogether missing from contemporary cinematic depictions of New York.

John Reed, Snowball’s Chance, Roof Books / 

Melville House, 2012.

Reed's first novel, A Still Small Voice, received high praise from an array of writers and critics. Paul Auster called it "a fine first novel by a young writer of great promise." SNOWBALL'S CHANCE is far more than a scathing sequel to George Orwell's Animal Farm, although it assuredly does count as that rarest of things: a successful sequel to a classic work. 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. 

"While reading SNOWBALL'S CHANCE, one plays this terrifying guessing game of animal clef: Which animal am I? Which animal is my neighbour? 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 horrible, frightening truths we might otherwise refuse to see. A scary, engrossing novel, a sustained triumph"--Johnathan Ames

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 companion 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, denounced by Christopher Hitchens, and barely dodging 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.

Orwell's sacred pigs get a proper roast. --Portland Tribune

The estate of George Orwell is not happy about it. --The New York Times

Some books double as a matchstick: if struck in the right conditions, they can cause a wildfire. ... In the three weeks following 9/11, John Reed wrote a riposte to the Cold War fairy tale; the brilliance of Snowball's Chance being that it expands upon Orwell's parable to include terrorism, making the story a workable paradigm for the current global context. --The Rumpus

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. --Guernica

A wicked illusionist. --Los Angeles Journal

A swift and satisfying read, viciously funny. --New York Post

Free John Reed! Free the piggies! --New York Press 

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. --The New York Times

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. --Creative Loafing, Charlotte 

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. --Fort Myers News-Press

Fearless, provocative, and both reverent and irreverent at the same time. --WordRiot

One of the keenest thinkers of our time. --PopMatters

John Reed, A Still Small Voice, Delta/Delacorte, 

2000.

A spellbinding novel of love and war from "a young writer of great promise."- Paul Auster

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, Tales of Woe, MTV Press, 2010. 

True stories of totally undeserved suffering. Spectacularly depressing. Nobody gets their just deserts. Crushing defeats. No happy endings. Abject misery. Pointless, endless grief.

No lessons of temperance or moderation. No saving grace. No divine intervention. No salvation.

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 misery—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 the katharsis of Ancient Greece: 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.

The Tales: strange, unexpected, morbidly enticing. Told straight—with elegance, restraint, and simplicity. The design: a one-of-kind white text on black paper, fluidly readable, and coupled with fifty pages of full-color art.

John Reed, The Whole, MTV Books, 2005.

From John Reed, author of the controversial Orwell parody, Snowball's Chance, comes a subversive satire of modern culture, the complete lack thereof, and a lost generation that no one even tried to look for.

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 deep void.

Then, as abruptly as the hole started growing, it stops.

So begins the first in a series of events that takes 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 "Black Rabbit," Thing and her dogged production crew travel around America, encountering Satanists, an Extraterrestrial/Christian cult group, and a surprisingly helpful phone psychic. Their search for answers 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 realizes that human civilization isn't all it's cracked up to be -- and that it's just about time to start over.

John Reed, Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love 

Poems, C&R Press, 2016.

Collected Lies and Love Poems, selects from a sequence of sonnets written from 2008-2015. Reed, the author of five previous books (three novels and two "stunts") lends his voice and eclectic abilities to this singular work, which, in addition to being a book of sonnets, is part love letter, part literary ode, and part delusion. Evolving the classical sonnet, a form which still captures our spirits, Reed summons our contemporary yearning: sugar sweet to splash of acid. "Come to me," writes Reed in sonnet #6, "like tomorrow to a child." Sonnet #41, in contrast, offers the lyrical confession, "All I want to do is stab people." With his plaintive lines, Reed gives expression to the inner ghost of the Twenty-First Century; sonnet #65, a valentine, wonders "Momma, are there other wooden children?" Free Boat spans 54+ sonnets, and that's a lot of sonnets, but Reed's stylistic ease guides his audience through an experience more akin to reading a photo essay. Indeed, of the 23 images in Free Boat, 9 are photographs by the author. Rhapsody, serenade, picaresque, Free Boat would be as comfortably tabled with Nadja by Andre Breton, as it would be with The Dream Songs by John Berryman, Delta of Venus by Anais Nin, or Under the Net by Iris Murdoch."