Chapter 1. Animal Farm Timeline.- Chapter 2. The Origin of Animal Farm.- Chapter 3. Animal Riot.- Chapter 4. George Orwell's 'The Freedom of the Press'.- Chapter 5. Solaris: Orwell, Hitchens, the Forever Cold War, and now China.- Chapter 6. Orwell's Angels (Army).- Chapter 7. Bunt by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont.- Chapter 8. A Few Names to be remembered with George Orwell.

“Free the piggies!”

—The New York Press

“Reed has captured the state of the farm today.”

—The Fort Myers News-Press

“A dizzying feat of writing and scholarship.”

—Lynne Tillman

“One plays this terrifying guessing game of animal a clef: which animal am I? Which animal is my neighbor?”

—Jonathan Ames

This book is the first and definitive reassessment of George Orwell, twenty-first century, written by an author at the nexus of Orwell's controversial literary, political and historical legacies. In The Never End, rabble-rouser, dogged investigator, and consummate literary stylist John Reed collects two decades of subject-Orwell findings published in Pank, Guernica, Literary Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The New York Press, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine and The Paris Review. Reed’s treatment of Orwell is corrective and peerlessly contemporary; he views Orwell in a twenty-first century global context, considering Orwell’s collaboration with Cold War intelligence operations—US and UK—with unfaltering objectivity. It’s hard to imagine that Orwell—in our own moment of global doublethink—wouldn’t have wanted his devotion to contrariety applied to the literary legacy he left behind. Animal Farm, based on a previously unknown Russian short story? Animal Farm, deployed by the CIA, MI6 and the Congress for Cultural Freedom? Orwell, turning over blacklists in a McCarthy-esque act of betrayal? The Cold War? Does it last forever? Russia, the “Axis of Evil,” and now China? But. Orwell. Course syllabi. Literary laurels. Snitch. Why do we keep coming back? For the wrong reasons? Or because we know Old Benjamin would want us to know the truth?

John Reed, associate professor and the current director of the MFA in Creative Writing at The NewSchool University, is the author of numerous works, including Snowball's Chance, the unauthorized companion to Animal Farm. He’s contributed to, among other venues: Slate, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, Vice, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and Harper’s Magazine. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University.

“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)

“Snowball’s Chance parodies Orwell’s Animal Farm, dragging it kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.” (Publisher’s Weekly)

“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.” (The Fort Myers News-Press)

“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)

“Orwell’s sacred pigs get a proper roast.” (The Portland Tribune)

“Fearless, provocative, and both reverent and irreverent at the same time.” (WordRiot)

“Some books double as a matchstick: if struck in the right conditions, they can cause a wildfire.” (The Rumpus)

“Reed has brought music’s remix culture to literature with stunning results.” (largeheartedboy)

“Reed skewers our early twenty-first century (edgy, tragic, absurd) with a marvelously precise wit.” (Locus Magazine)

“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)

“One of the keenest thinkers of our time.” (PopMatters)

“A brilliant and challenging tour de force. Which could be said about every book of his.” (Michael Lally)

“John Reed has been writing hard-to-classify books for over a decade, to great acclaim and sometimes greater notoriety.” (Bomb Magazine)

“This book has something to upset almost everyone who reads it, just like a good book should.” (Dennis Loy Johnson)