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, apparently in the process of psychic collapse, a conspiracy emerges to murder him before he can compromise the mission or destroy the ship. Resisting this conspiracy is Monamy, a nonhuman Archivist who alone understands the nature of Applewhite's breakdown. Inside the uncanny ship, chilling violence and grotesque forms break out. Meanwhile, 1,500 years after the abandonment of the planet, the last man on Earth struggles to survive and, somehow, escape. Cinematic and intimate, James Reich's latest novel evokes a yearning for the future evolving into panic, and the contradictions of nostalgia for forgotten things. Like Silent Running and The Man Who Fell to Earth before it, Skinship penetrates the loneliness of an ecological crisis.

Set against a haunting Martian landscape, The Song My Enemies Sing is a surreal, disquieting science fiction vision of murder, revolution, manipulation and mystery. Ray Spector's search for meaning leads him to a teenage Black Panther named Eli Jones, the missionary Philip Olmos, sometime television star Richard Parish, and Ingrid Auer, who dreams of becoming a terrorist. Under the shimmering Grid drawn by the swarm satellites encircling the planet, with fading memories of an apocalyptic California, the Australian outback, and the jungles of Mexico, their obsessions form strange patterns, dangerous relationships, and alliances across time and species. Science fiction legend Barry N. Malzberg, the first recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, describes James Reich's fifth novel as a history of science fiction form, origin and development, and merciless in its refusal to pander to the easier implications of its material. In the lineage of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, William Burroughs' Nova trilogy, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, these distant episodes will possess you.

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 experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues - present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and filmmaker Dusan Makavejev, tended to distort his theory. The psychosis attached to Reich by his detractors was the culmination of decades of scapegoating by psychoanalysts, Nazis, communists, and conservatives. But Reich's environmental and Cold War preoccupations and his slow-burning fascination with UFO phenomena were not signs of a madness incipient since his break with Sigmund Freud. They anticipated and reflected much in the American psyche.

Defining the presence of a cinematic self in the misunderstood analyst once considered an heir to Freud, Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers rejects orthodox portrayals of Reich's final years as merely pathological. Combining original analysis and evidence from the Wilhelm Reich Archive, James Reich uncovers the fatal moments in the psychologist's uncanny identification with the spaceman, and the myth of a scientist lost to his own grandiosity and paranoia. Taking seriously the influence of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bad Day at Black Rock, and other pop cultural narratives on Reich, this psychoanalytic detective story concerns existential traps, conscious and unconscious collaborations and betrayals by disciples, and unidentified flying object-relations. Reich's is an atomic-age passion narrative. Vitally, Reich's story could be ours. The author is not related to his subject.

James Reich is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. He is the author of The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books, 2023), The Song My Enemies Sing (Anti-Oedipus, 2018), Soft Invasions (Anti-Oedipus, 2017), Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness (Anti-Oedipus, 2016), I, Judas (Soft Skull, 2011), and Bombshell (Soft Skull, 2013). His account of innovations in British science fiction is published by Bloomsbury in its Decades series, The 1960s. His nonfiction has also appeared in Salon, SPIN Magazine, The Huffington Post, International Times, and other literary and cultural publications. Reich was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire in the West of England, and has been a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico since 2009. He was greatly influenced by early exposure to the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and by a small book on dadaism, and later by Andy Warhol, the Beats, science fiction, psychoanalysis, punk rock, and the films of Ken Russell and Nic Roeg. Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, J.G. Ballard, Anne Sexton, Paul Bowles, D.H. Lawrence, and Lars von Trier are also vital constellations in his work. He has a Master's degree in Ecopsychology from Naropa University.

Los Angeles, 1942. Psychoanalyst Maxwell McKinney and his wife Joan await the return of their son after the sinking of the USS Yorktown. With sections of the city under camouflage and ordinances against enemy aliens, McKinney is troubled by his ambivalent feelings for his son and fears that California will be invaded by the Japanese. A chance encounter with a man who appears to be his double, a screenwriter named Sid Starr, allows McKinney to confront his guilt. Entwined with McKinney, Starr finds that his own identity is at stake, and between the two, McKinney's wife and son fight against their own destruction.

Punctuating great American fears, James Reich targets the zones of recent history where worlds and anxieties collide, among them UFOs, the Battle of Midway, Hollywood, psychoanalysis and Japanese internment. Soft Invasions is an existential thriller about cowardice, cruelty and betrayal that invokes David Cronenberg's body-horror classics as well as the cold California glamor of Joan Didion, the ominous noir of Horace McCoy, and the psychic angst of Norman Mailer.

This edition features an afterword by literary and media theorist Laurence A. Rickels.

At once a gripping metaphysical mystery of Depression-era New York and a tender ode to our dying future, James Reich's The Moth for the Star is by turns horrifying and poignant, coldly thrilling and richly evocative. Charles Varnas is a murderer who cannot recall his victim. His cool, androgynous conspirator Campbell may hold the secret. Haunted and dissolute, they struggle to come to terms with the psychic weight of their crime. With a control of language and rhythm few can match, Reich transports his readers from the streets of Cairo to the canals of Venice, from the heights of Manhattan's Chrysler Building to the shadow of the Sphinx. The Moth for the Star is a dark, sprawling romance, riddled with paranormal drama, a singular work destined to remain with you long after reading.

Bombshell is a feminist nuclear thriller set twenty-five years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, in which an alienated young Russian woman born in its shadow undertakes a road trip across the U.S., waging a guerrilla war against the nuclear industry and leaving in her wake a trail of destruction and assassinations. Obsessed with would-be Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas, Varyushka Cash recreates her atomic past through escalating violence and her one true goal: an assault on the Indian Point nuclear plant on the bank of the Hudson River. All along she is relentlessly pursued by the CIA, eager to capture Varyushka on charges of domestic terrorism. The cat-and-mouse chase leads to a final showdown in a decimated and irradiated New York, there on the cusp of a frightening new future.

The initial draft of Bombshell was completed five months before the Fukushima catastrophe, written from the author's morbid suspicion that the twenty-fifth anniversary of catastrophe at Chernobyl, Pripyat, and beyond would be marked by an echo in the present, shadowed by the real threat present in our unguarded and deteriorating nuclear facilities. Bombshell is a combustible and commercial step forward by one of our most creative and intellectual writers today.

Judas Iscariot is the historical symbol of betrayal. But what really happened at the Garden of Gethsemane? What really compelled Judas to hang himself from a tree? I, Judas reimagines Iscariot's relationship to Jesus Christ and explores Judas's orchestration of the elaborate con of the divinity of Jesus Christ, subverting the legend of Judas as he inhabits some of our most notorious literary and historic figures in their darkest hours. Custer, Sexton, Van Gogh: These famous suicides converge through the figure of Judas in a cutting-edge piece of fiction that exposes the dangers of seeking universal truths in myth.

In MISTAH KURTZ A PRELUDE TO HEART OF DARKNESS, James Reich discloses the contents of the papers that Kurtz entrusts to Marlow and the end of Joseph Conrad's canonical novella. Drawing on clues left in Conrad's account, the novel anticipates and dovetails with the arrival of Marlow at Kurtz's ivory station in the Congo. Giving voice to one of the most enigmatic characters in the literary canon, Reich presents meticulous and controversial solutions to the origins, mystery and messianic deterioration of Mistah Kurtz: company man, elephant man, poet, feral god. Appalling rivalries, murder, fragile loyalties, doubt and desire shroud the pages of this book-part adventure, part desperate confession. Filtering the strangeness of Apocalypse Now and historical accounts of the ivory trade, this irreverent, audacious endeavor lends meat and madness to the ghosts of the Congo, names that which had been nameless, and renders this Season in Hell in crystalline clarity.