Stephen King sits at his desk tapping a Montblanc against a yellow legal pad. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Twilight Zone : Wild West, Twilight Zone : Wild West, he thinks. Someone, call it a deity, clicks on a light bulb above his head. In a whisk, King's hand snatches at a row of books above his battered...
Reed does not get the respect nor the addition to the canon he should have years ago. This is a marvelous book which makes Pynchon's CRYING OF LOT 49 look like a picture book for beginner readers. The dialect is masterful, the distortions adapt, and the message clear. Reed manages to weave a poet...
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 propagated by Louisiana Red and those militant opp...
Ishmael Reed has created a sharp, wildly funny slave's-eye view of the Civil War. Three slaves infected with Dysaethesia Aethipica (a term coined in the nineteenth century for the disease that makes Negroes run away) escape from Virginia. Not satisfied with leaving slavery halfway, one of the tri...
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 Eyebal...
Rain has fallen and created many water puddles in the streets of Harlem. Moving on an invisible cord, H.V.V. climbs the steps, a spider swollen on snake venom, of the building where Abdul’s office is located. All wormy and creepy-like, H. “Safecracker” Gould follows behind. The strange pair reach...
Wright3 (The Media and the Clinton campaign sought to break candidate Obama by associating him with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Predictably, Wright’s complex theology was reduced to an inflammatory sound bite. So effective was this campaign that Obama had to make a speech denouncing Rev. Wright. Largel...