Born into a Navy family, Kit Reed moved so often as a kid that she never settled down in one place. She doesn’t know whether that’s A Good Thing or not, but it colors everything she writes. Her most recent novel,WHERE, is set in the tidelands of South Carolina: the population of an entire island vanishes. MORMAMA, scheduled for spring, 2017 , unfolds in sort-of ancestral’ territory, a deteriorating mansion on a once-distinguished street in Jacksonville, Florida. The peripatetic Reed calls herself ‘”transgenred” for some of the same reasons. Publishers Weekly calls her “one of our brightest cultural commentators.” You’ll find links to reviews of her work in Financial Times, The New York Times Book Review, Locus, The Wall Street Journal et al. linked on this page, and for the rest? Scroll down. Her most recent novel, WHERE is now available in paperback. MORMAMA will be published in May, 2017. Recent books include Son of Destruction and The Story Until Now, with an introduction by Gary K. Wolfe. The collection features some Reed classics as well as her personal favorites over several decades, including six new stories, never before collected. Both The Story Until Now and her 2011 collection What Wolves Know were Shirley Jackson award nominees in 2011 and 2013. ]
In a starred review, P.W. praises her novel Enclave as “a gripping dystopian thriller.”
Other novels include The Baby Merchant and Thinner Than Thou, a winner of the A.L.A. Alex Award. The New York Times Book Review has this to say about her work: “Most of these stories shine with the incisive edginess of brilliant cartoons… they are less fantastic than visionary.” A Guggenheim fellow, she is the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. Her stories appear in venues including The Yale Review, Asimov’s SF, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature and The Kenyon Review. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, both published by the Wesleyan University Press, were finalists for the Tiptree Prize.
A longtime member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she serves as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.
Kit Reed has published 22 novels and over a hundred short stories, has garnered awards, and remains as critically feted as she is commercially underrated. A reason for this is that she one of those authors whose work loiters at the mainstream edge of SF. She calls herself “transgenred” acknowledging the problem that her fiction […]
“When a short story collection starts with a 90-year old Salman Rushdie being attacked by an ancient assassin as he throws out a ceremonial opening ball at Yankee Stadium (now a monstroplex shopping mall owned by the Sultan of Brunei), you know you’re dealing with a feverishly creative mind. The author of the well-received short […]
Publishers Weekly starred reviewEnclave Kit Reed. Tor, $25.95 (368p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2161-9 In this gripping dystopian satire, ex-marine Sargent Whitmore has a plan to make millions while protecting children from the self-destructing modern world. He turns an old Mediterranean monastery into a combined impenetrable fortress and school, and enrolls 100 filthy-rich children, most of them already well-known […]
“The always incendiary Kit Reed‘s The Baby Merchant envisions a world of designer babies.” —Vanity Fair “Reed, a fierce thinker, is poking at the soft spot of our national anxiety about every aspect of making babies and raising children.”—Washington Post Book World “Reed writes a fast-paced thriller with a consummate sense of style.” –A.L.A. Booklist “In Starbird, she […]
from The Chicago Sun-Times ‘Children’ delivers adventure, cultural commentary Batman’s Joker has nothing on Amos Zozz. The monstrous head of Castertown’s MegaMall is the evil genius behind, or in his case beneath, the sinister setting in Kit Reed’s new book for young readers. The Night Children (Starscape, 240 pages, $17.95), which follows in the vein of […]
Kirkus calls Kit Reed’s Thinner Than Thou “Unsettling, sometimes appalling: satire edging remorselessly toward reality.” *Publishers Weekly: “Reed (@expectations) rips into the dangerous pursuit of body perfection at the expense of the soul in this stinging and mordantly witty satire… A cast of delicious characters, caught like insects in day-glo amber, features bewildered twin teens Betz and Danny Abercrombie… With […]
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