The Song My Enemies Sing

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 Philipé 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.

JAMES REICH is the author of a quartet of psy-fi titles with Anti-Oedipus Press that include Skinship, The Song My Enemies Sing, Soft Invasions, and Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness. He is also the author of Wilhelm Reich versus The Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy (Punctum Books) as well as The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books) and two novels from Soft Skull Press, Bombshell and I, Judas. His account of innovations in British science fiction is published by Bloomsbury in its “Decades” series, The 1960s, and he was an early contributor to editions of Deep Ends: The J.G. Ballard Anthology. Reich’s work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Brooklyn Rail , CrimeReads, Salon, SPIN Magazine, The Huffington Post, American Book Review, The Rumpus, International Times, Sensitive Skin, and many others. He holds an M.A. in Ecopsychology from Naropa University and is completing a Ph.D. in Psychology with the California Institute of Integral Studies. Born in England in 1971, Reich has lived in New Mexico since 2009.

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"Absolutely astonishing." —BARRY N. MALZBERG

"The surrealistic nature woven into the prose is engaging and pushes the mysteries to the forefront of your mind." —THE BIG SMOKE

"The Song My Enemies Sing is a sexy, seductive, vertiginous read. Characters move in and out of time. Many of the chapters stand alone as stories in themselves. Events, historical figures, myths and literature shift and weave across and through the novel in a disorienting hallucinatory manner. They demand to be reassembled through reading in ways that work the reader hard. Despite this, and perhaps because of it, the dominant effect is that of deep affect. It is very exciting and moving to read the result of Reich’s extraordinary imaginative work." —PIPPA TANDY

"James Reich's The Song My Enemies Sing confirms his first-rank position as a major voice in XXIst century literature, a definite heir of Pynchon, Ballard and consorts, dark, unforgiving and incredibly exciting." —SEB DOUBINSKY