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Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( R ) : Reed, Ishmael Scott
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The Classic Freewheeling Look at Race Relations Through the AgesMumbo Jumbo is Ishmael Reed's brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization, a racy and uproarious commentary on our society. In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.
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A new collection of essays first published in The New York Times and Playboy. Reed tackles subjects including Oakland, eugenics, and domestic violence,
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Brilliantly portrayed by a novelist with "a talent for hyperbole and downright yarning unequaled since Mark Twain", (Saturday Review), this slave's-eye view of the Civil War exposes America's racial foibles of the past and present with uninhibited humor and panache. Mixing history, fantasy, political reality, and comedy, Ishmael Reed spins the tale of three runaway slaves and the master determined to catch them. His on-target parody of fugitive slave narratives and other literary forms includes a hero who boards a jet bound for Canada; Abraham Lincoln waltzing through slave quarters to the tune of "Hello, Dolly"; and a plantation mistress entranced by TV's "Beecher Hour". Filled with insights into the political consciences (or lack thereof) of both blacks and whites, Flight to Canada confirms Reed's status as "a great writer" (James Baldwin). "A demonized Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book that reinvents the particulars of slavery in America with comic rage". -- The New York Times Book Review "Wears the mantle of Baldwin and Ellison like a high-powered Flip Wilson in drag...a terrifically funny book". -- Baltimore Sun
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Mercury House is proud to launch the NEA Heritage & Preservation Series, which celebrates the multicultural diversity of American letters by restoring to print unduly neglected modern classics of cultural identity. Our second title for this series, which will include an introduction by Ishmael Reed, is The Wig by Charles Wright.The Wig is the story of Lester Jefferson, a young man of good will, whose repeated attempts to become a part of The Great Society are doomed in advance. Aided, thwarted, and confused by numerous, curious companions, Lester conducts his inevitable search for happiness in a series of absurdist misadventures that begins with the transformation of the hair on his head into burnished silken curls.
"Charles Wright's Negro world explodes with the crazy laughter of a man past caring. . . . His style, as mean and vicious a weapon as a rusty hacksaw, is the perfect vehicle for his zany pessimism. . . . The Wig is a brutal, exciting, and necessary book."-Conrad Knickerbocker, The New York TimesCharles Stevenson Wright was born in New Franklin, Missouri, in 1932. At the age of 18 he attended the James Jones & Lowney Turner Handy Writer's Colony in Marshall, Illinois. A former columnist for the Village Voice ("Wright's World"), he has also written for Vogue and The New York Times. He served two years in the U.S. Army, the last year in Korea. He is the author of three published works: The Messenger (1963), The Wig (1966), and a "journal-novel" Absolutely Nothing to Be Alarmed About (1973). He lives in New York City.Ishmael Reed, a preeminent figure of contemporary African-American letters, has been nominated twice for the National Book Award (for Conjure and Mumbo Jumbo). A lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, he lives in Oakland, where he runs Ishmael Reed Publi-cations (www.ishmaelreedpub.com).
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Ishmael Reed's electrifying first novel zooms readers off to a land they have never heard of, a crazy, ominous kingdom called HARRY SAM--a never-never land so weirdly out-of-whack that only reality itself could be stranger. Venturing into this risky realm of a thousand contradictions is the quixotic Bukka Doopeyduk, a crusading, liberal fellow who is eager--if not always ready--to face the dangers of life. And dangers abound. Jousting and colliding with a macabre carousel of cops and beatniks, Elks and Black Muslims, he suffers a series of cockeyed misfortunes--maddening, saddening, and wildly uproarious. The Free-Lance Pallbearers fires a volley of savage torpedoes at the world's absurdities. Its rollicking language and blasphemous humor hide a merciless message.
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"Folks. This here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick. A bullwhacker so unfeeling he left the print of winged mice on hides of crawling women. A desperado so onery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's swine." And so begins the HooDoo Western by Ishmael Reed, author of MUMBO JUMBO and one of America's most innovative and celebrated writers. Reed demolishes white American history and folklore as well as Christian myth in this masterful satire of contemporary American life. In addition to the black, satanic Loop Garoo Kid, YELLOW BACK RADIO BROKE-DOWN features Drag Gibson (a rich, slovenly cattleman), Mustache Sal (his nymphomaniac mail-order bride), Thomas Jefferson and many others in a hilarious parody of the old Western.
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Chappie: Puttbutt, an African-American professor at the overwhelmingly white Jack London University, suddenly finds himself the academic dean of the school and, drunk with power, sets out to even old scores. Reprint.
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When Papa LaBas (private eye, noonday HooDoo, and hero of Reed's MUMBO JUMBO) comes to Berkeley, California, to investigate the mysterious death of Ed Yellings, owner of the Solid Gumbo Works, he finds himself fighting the rising tide of violence propogated by Louisiana Red and those militant opportunists, the Moochers. A HooDoo detective story and a comprehensive satire on the explosive politics of the '60s, THE LAST DAYS OF LOUISIANA RED exposes the hypocrisy of contemporary American culture and race politics.
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Ishmael Reed has been described as cavorting "like a black bull in the china shop of Western culture," and The Reed Reader is a collection of the sharp, jagged results of his rampage. In it, one of the most renowned African American writers offers a generous sampling of the brilliant and witty satire, the politically charged, wildly imaginative storytelling, and the caustic cultural criticism that have become his trademarks. In these excerpts from his celebrated novels, poems, plays, and essays, Reed displays an ironic wit, a cold, keen eye for economic exploitation, a hilarious sense of the absurd, and a slender but persistent optimism for the determined souls who transcend their environment and penetrate illusions by daring acts of will. The Reed Reader is the cumulative representation of an astonishing career, a powerful testament to Reed's many and enormous literary gifts.
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The Terrible Twos is a wickedly funny, sharp-edged fictional assault on all those sulky, spoiled naysayers needing instant gratification--Americans. Ishmael Reed's sixth novel depicts a zany, bizarre, and all-too-believable future where mankind's fate depends upon a jolly old gent named St. Nicholas and a Risto-rasta dwarf named Black Peter, who together wreak mischievous havoc on Wall Street and in the Oval Office. This offbeat, on-target social critique makes marvelous fun of everything that is American, from commercialism to Congress, Santa Claus to religious cults.
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In The Terrible Threes, Ishmael Reed proves that he is one of the most innovative voices in contemporary literature. This adventure into the world of offbeat humor and on-target social criticism is a vision of America in the not-too-distant future, a portrait of a fairy-tale gone awry. This novel begins where The Terrible Twos left off, in the late 1990s, three years after President and former fashion model Dean Clift was laughed out of office, with the nation in chaos and the White House implicated in a covert operation to rid America of surplus people and the Third World of its nuclear weapons. A blend of science fiction, folklore, history, fantasy, social satire, and all out surrealist comedy, The Terrible Threes bears Reed's distinctive voice and message. At once a threat, a promise, a prediction, and the awful truth about the land of the free and the home of the brave, the tale is wholly unforgettable. Once you've seen the world through Reed's eyes, you might never see it the same way again.
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essays: THE COLOR PURPLE film, August Wilson &c
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It's the 1980s and the politics of the New York theater scene have taken yet another turn. Masochism is out and feminism is in, Jews are out and Germans are in, race is out and gender is in, and everyone's fighting (and rewriting) for a piece of the pie. Jewish director Jim Minsk disappears during a trip to the South. Black playwright Ian Ball writes the all-female play RECKLESS EYEBALLING in hopes of getting off the "sex-list." Preeminent playwright Jack Brashford, claiming the Jews stole all his black material, decides to write about Armenians. In the background, an unknown assailant dubbed the "Flower Phantom" runs loose through the city shaving heads of prominent black feminists (to the secret delight of black men).In this hilarious, devastating, but also deeply sympathetic novel, Ishmael Reed turns characters on the backs, sides, tops and bottoms to expose the multiple hypocrisies at the heart of American culture.