Reviews
"What a dramatic re-imagination is herein offered us!"-- Richard Foreman "The literary Trick of the Year!"-- New York Post "A shrewd, gutsy remix that brings the conscience of Shakespeare to our troubled time."-- Spalding Gray "An inspired bit of bricolage... 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 "Reed's performance (classical post-Modernism, I guess you could call it) turned out to be a fabulously imaginative reinvention of existing Shakespearean plays into a completely new one, like a chemistry experiment re-linking polymers into new fabric... wonderfully clear, 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 "Reed has brought music's remix culture to literature with stunning results."-- David Gutowski, largehearted boy "Alerted the world to a timbre of postmodern genius never before seen in American letters."-- Rami Shamir, Evergreen Review "A wicked illusionist."-- Los Angeles Journal "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, In an inspired bit of bricolage, Reed selects characters and passages from Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V and recombines them into a new work. Well, new is an overstatement, since all major plot twists are lifted from the aforementioned plays--the murder of an old king by someone poisoned by ambition, a young prince determined to expose his father's killer, an innocent young woman falsely accused and then murdered by her husband. Only the names have been shuffled to freshen the story. Here Macbeth kills Hamlet's father, Juliet marries Hamlet (and then, poor girl, plays Desdemona to his Othello), and King Lear leads an army, like Fortinbras, into Hamlet's bloodsoaked country (Bohemia, not Denmark). 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. -- Booklist Praise for John Reed's novels: "John Reed excels in the realm of the strange." -- San Francisco Examiner "Reed's book is a swift and satisfying read, viciously funny, out of left field." -- The New York Post, Praise for John Reed’s novels: John Reed excels in the realm of the strange.” —San Francisco Examiner Reed’s book is a swift and satisfying read, viciously funny, out of left field.” —The New York Post, In an inspired bit of bricolage, Reed selects characters and passages from Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V and recombines them into a new work. Well, new is an overstatement, since all major plot twists are lifted from the aforementioned plays-the murder of an old king by someone poisoned by ambition, a young prince determined to expose his father's killer, an innocent young woman falsely accused and then murdered by her husband. Only the names have been shuffled to freshen the story. Here Macbeth kills Hamlet's father, Juliet marries Hamlet (and then, poor girl, plays Desdemona to his Othello), and King Lear leads an army, like Fortinbras, into Hamlet's bloodsoaked country (Bohemia, not Denmark). 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. - Booklist Praise for John Reed's novels: "John Reed excels in the realm of the strange." - San Francisco Examiner "Reed's book is a swift and satisfying read, viciously funny, out of left field." - The New York Post
