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 ReviewWears the mantle of Baldwin and Ellison like a high-powered Flip Wilson in drag...a terrifically funny book. -- Baltimore Sun

Mystic Parallax is the first major monograph by rising interdisciplinary artist Awol Erizku. Working across photography, film, video, painting, and installation, his work references and re-imagines African American and African visual culture, from hip hop vernacular to Nefertiti, while nodding to traditions of spirituality and Surrealism. This comprehensive monograph spans Erizku's career, blending his studio practice with his work as an in-demand editorial photographer working regularly for the New Yorker, New York magazine, Time, and GQ, among others, and features his conceptual portraits of Black cultural icons, such as Solange, Amanda Gorman, and Michael B. Jordan. As Erizku recently told the New York Times, "It's important for me to create confident, powerful, downright regal images of Black people." Featuring essays by critically acclaimed author Ishmael Reed, curator Ashley James, and writer Doreen St. Felix, and interviews with the artist by Urs Fischer and Antwaun Sargent, Mystic Parallax is a luminous and arresting testament to the artist's tremendous power and originality.

'A great writer' James Baldwin 'Part vision, part satire, part farce ... a wholly original, unholy cross between the craft of fiction and witchcraft' The New York Times A plague is spreading across 1920s America, racing from New Orleans to New York. It's an epidemic of free expression, carried by black artists, and its symptoms are an uncontrollable urge to dance, sing, laugh and jive. The state will stop at nothing to suppress the outbreak, but, deep in the heart of Harlem, private eye and Vodum priest Papa LaBas has other ideas - and, possibly, the key to everything. A freewheeling, explosive blend of jazz, ragtime, ancient myth, magic and conspiracy thriller, this anarchic postmodern classic is a satire for our times.

Including material and photographs not included in most of the 100 other books about the champion, Ishmael Reed's The Complete Muhammad Ali is more than just a biography - it is a fascinating portrait of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. An honest, balanced portrayal of Ali, the book includes voices that have been omitted from other books. It charts Ali's evolution from Black Nationalism to a universalism, but does not discount the Nation of Islam and Black Nationalism's important influence on his intellectual development. Filipino American author Emil Guillermo speaks about how The Thrilla In Manila brought the Philippines into the 20th century. Fans of Muhammad Ali, boxing fans, and those interested in modern African American history and the Nation of Islam will be fascinated by this biography by an accomplished American author.

A major literary event-the eagerly anticipated publication of a long-lost novel from legendary writer and three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee John Oliver Killens, hailed as the founding father of the Black Arts Movement and mentor to celebrated writers, including Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Arthur Flowers, and Terry McMillan. Wanderlust has taken Jimmy Jay Leander Johnson on numerous adventures, from Mississippi to Washington D.C., Vietnam, London and eventually to Africa, to the fictitious Independent People's Democratic Republic of Guanaya, where the young musician hopes to "find himself." But this small sliver of a country in West Africa, recently freed from British colonial rule, is thrown into turmoil with the discovery of cobanium-a radioactive mineral 500 times more powerful than uranium, making it irresistible for greedy speculators, grifters, and charlatans. Overnight, outsiders descend upon the sleepy capital city looking for "a piece of the action." When a plot to assassinate Guanaya's leader is discovered, Jimmy Jay-a dead ringer for the Prime Minister-is enlisted in a counter scheme to foil the would-be coup. He will travel to America with half of Guanaya's cabinet ministers to meet with the President of the United States and address the UN General Assembly, while the rest of the cabinet will remain in Guanaya with the real Prime Minister. What could go wrong? Everything. Set in the 1980s, this smart, funny, dazzlingly brilliant novel is a literary delight-and the final gift from an American literary legend.

California is still the world's biggest hideout. The only thing more western is the Pacific Ocean, where, if the Big One happens, California might find a home at the bottom. One of those hiding out is Peter Bowman, a former army brat, and lecturer at Woodrow Wilson Community College, who is being hunted for a quality most men would crave. But for Bowman, nicknamed Boa, it has become burdensome. When an opportunity comes, he has to choose between becoming financially solvent or exposing himself to his pursuers. Along the way, he runs into some memorable characters both in reality and in his dreams, including Ishmael Reed. In Ishmael Reed's Conjugating Hindi, stories, histories and myths of different cultures are mixed and sampled. Modern issues like gentrification addressed. It is the closest that a fiction writer has gotten to the hip-hop form on the page. Once again, Ishmael Reed has pioneered a new form. If his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, was an early Afro-Futurist novel, Mumbo Jumbo recognized as "a graphic novel before we used the term" (according to Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson), Yellow Back Radio Broke Down Blazing Saddles's "important precursor," Flight To Canada his "Neo Slave Narrative," a concept that he coined-Conjugating Hindi is his global novel. One that crosses all borders.

All across the Americas, from the 16th century onwards, enslaved Africans escaped their captors and struck out on their own. These runaways, having found their freedom, established their own communities or joined with indigenous peoples to forge new identities. Cimarron, borrowing a Spanish-American term for these fugitive former slaves, is a new series of photographic portraits of their descendants. From Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean islands and Central America, as far as the southern United States, elaborate masquerades are staged that celebrate and keep alive the history and memory of African slaves and their creole or mixed-race descendants. Stock characters are portrayed in costume, or in grotesque or satirical representations. A huge variety of African tribal dress, wild ritual regalia and shimmering Mardi Gras outfits feature in breathtaking succession. Vividly coloured silks and cottons combine with woven fibres, leaves, feathers, and bodypaint; props include emblems of slavery and slavemasters - ropes, sticks, guns and machetes. These photographs record real people whose collective sense of memory, folk history and imagination dramatically challenges our expectations. Charles Freger's work has established a large and growing following among connoisseurs of contemporary photography, defining a new genre of documentary portraiture that extends and deepens our sense of the human past and the present.

Benjamin "Chappie" Puttbutt, a black juior professor at the overwhelmingly white Jack London College, lusts after tenure and its glorious perks (including a house in the Oakland Hills). He spends most of his time trying to divine the ideological climate of the school and obligingly adapting his beliefs to it. When Puttbutt's mysterious Japanese tutor, who promises to teach him Japanese by spring, suddenly becomes the school's new president and appoints Puttbutt as academic dean, the fun really begins--for Puttbutt sets out to stir things up and settle old scores.

Turning every contemporary political and social movement on its head--from feminism to nationalism to jingoism--this boistrois and irreverent novel manages to be by turns hilarious and totally serious.

"One of the funniest satires of university politics I've ever read. Ishmael Reed is funnier than Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal." --Leslie Marmon Silko

"Reed is, as always, an American original; a wiseguy whose wisdom is the real thing," --The Boston Sunday Globe

The definitive guide to a major African American poet. This volume promises to be the definitive guide to Calvin C. Hernton's unparalleled poetic career, re-introducing readers to a major voice in American poetry. Hernton was a cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop; a participant in the Black Arts Movement, R. D. Laing's Kingsley Hall, and the Antiuniversity of London; and a teacher at Oberlin College who counted amongst his friends bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Odetta. As a pioneer in the field of Black Studies, Hernton developed a theoretical and practical pedagogy with lasting impact on generations of students. He may be best known as an anti-sexist sociologist, following in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois, but Hernton viewed himself, above all, as a poet. This volume includes a generous selection of Hernton's previously published poems, from classics like the often anthologized "The Distant Drum" to the visionary epic The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, reprinted in full for the first time since 1964, alongside uncollected and unpublished material from the Calvin C. Hernton papers at Ohio University, a new critical introduction, and detailed notes, chronology, and bibliography. [sample poem] The Distant Drum I am not a metaphor or symbol. This you hear is not the wind in the trees. Nor a cat being maimed in the street. I am being maimed in the street It is I who weep, laugh, feel pain or joy. Speak this because I exist. This is my voice These words are my words, my mouth Speaks them, my hand writes. I am a poet. It is my fist you hear beating Against your ear.

In this hard-hitting anthology, Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank have invited a diverse group of informed and accomplished writers, both women and men, who are rarely heard to comment on the long-standing bigotry on Broadway towards many different ethnic minorities. How do intellectuals and scholars feel about how members of their ethnic groups are portrayed on Broadway? How would we know? Very few of them have the power to rate which plays and musicals are worthy and which are flops, and above all, be heard or read. The American critical fraternity is an exclusive club. In this hard-hitting anthology, Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank have invited a diverse group of informed and accomplishes writers, both women and men, who are rarely heard to comment on the long-standing bigotry on Broadway towards many different ethnic minorities. Contributors include Lonely Christopher, Tommy Curry, Jack Foley, Emil Guillermo, Claire J. Harris, Yuri Kageyama, Soraya McDonald, Nancy Mercado, Aimee Phan, Betsy Theobald Richards, Shawn Wong, David Yearsley, and the editors. Under review are Madame Butterfly, the Irving Berlin songbook, Oklahoma, South Pacific, Miss Saigon, Flower Drum Song, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, The Color Purple, The Book of Mormon, West Side Story and Hamilton.

A major literary event-the eagerly anticipated publication of a long-lost novel from legendary writer and three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee John Oliver Killens, hailed as the founding father of the Black Arts Movement and mentor to celebrated writers, including Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Arthur Flowers, and Terry McMillan. Wanderlust has taken Jimmy Jay Leander Johnson on numerous adventures, from Mississippi to Washington D.C., Vietnam, London and eventually to Africa, to the fictitious Independent People's Democratic Republic of Guanaya, where the young musician hopes to "find himself." But this small sliver of a country in West Africa, recently freed from British colonial rule, is thrown into turmoil with the discovery of cobanium-a radioactive mineral 500 times more powerful than uranium, making it irresistible for greedy speculators, grifters, and charlatans. Overnight, outsiders descend upon the sleepy capital city looking for "a piece of the action." When a plot to assassinate Guanaya's leader is discovered, Jimmy Jay-a dead ringer for the Prime Minister-is enlisted in a counter scheme to foil the would-be coup. He will travel to America with half of Guanaya's cabinet ministers to meet with the President of the United States and address the UN General Assembly, while the rest of the cabinet will remain in Guanaya with the real Prime Minister. What could go wrong? Everything. Set in the 1980s, this smart, funny, dazzlingly brilliant novel is a literary delight-and the final gift from an American literary legend.

In Black Hollywood Unchained, Ishmael Reed gathers an impressive group of scholars, critics, intellectuals, and artist to examine and respond to the contemporary portrayals of Blacks in films. Using the 2012 release of the film Django Unchained as the focal point of much of the discussion, these essays and reviews provide a critical perspective on the challenges facing filmmakers and actors when confronted with issues on race and the historical portrayal of African American characters. Reed also addresses the black community's perceptiveness as discerning and responsible consumers of film, theatre, art, and music. Contributors to this collection are: Jill Nelson, Amiri Baraka, Cecil Brown, Halifu Osumare, Houston A. Baker, Tony Medina, Herb Boyd, Jerry Ward, Ruth Elizabeth Burks, Art Burton, Justin Desmangles, Jesse Douglass, Jack Foley, Joyce A. Joyce, C. Leigh McInnis, Heather Russell, Harriette Surovell, Kathryn Takara, and Al Young.

A new collection of essays first published in The New York Times and Playboy. Reed tackles subjects including Oakland, eugenics, and domestic violence,

One of the founding fathers of multi-cultural studies, Ishmael Reed first came to the attention of the literary world as a poet, and despite success as a novelist, playwright, essayist, and recording artist, has never ceased to be a poet. He delves into spiritual and political waters with his own unexpected and uniquely powerful voice.
"New and Collected Poems, 1966-2006 captures four decades of Reed's inimitable verse, a visionary journey from Chattanooga to New York, from Africa to Oakland. In language that is pointed, innovative, and profound, Reed weaves politics and war with Yoruba and Jazz, and takes on American culture, from prejudice to Pepsi to George W. Bush.
In this important and long-awaited volume, one of America's most esteemed and intrepid poets, whose "Beware Do Not Read This Poem" has been cited by Gale Research as one of about 20 poems most frequently studied in literature courses, shows why he has helped define our cultural forefront from the '60s to today.

An irreverent, brilliant, politically charged barrage of essays aimed with Reed's famous vitriol and wit at the perpetrators of America's war on blacks. African Americans have been at war with some elements of the white population from the very beginning. In this collection of essays, his first since Airing Dirty Laundry in 1993, Reed explores the many forms that this homefront war has taken. His brilliant social criticism feints deftly among past and present, government and media, personal and political. From the author whose essay style has been compared to the punching power of boxers Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali, this book is a series of fast, powerful strikes against America's long tradition of racism.

'Reinvents the particulars of slavery in America with a comic rage ... The book explodes. Reed's special grace is anger ... a muscular, luminous prose' The New York Times 'It always was, and will always be the most fearlessly original, most viciously political, most rambunctiously funny epic of slavery ever written. America almost doesn't deserve it' - Marlon James (2015 Man Booker Prize Winner) 'I loves it here ... We gets whipped with a velvet whip, and there's free dentalcare' Three slaves are on the run in the deep South, with their former master hot on their heels and the Civil War raging. One of them arms himself for a final showdown; one sells his body for pornographic movies; while the last, Raven Quickskill - hero, poet, heartbreaker - swigs champagne on a non-stop jumbo jet to Canada. Taking us on a wild ride through a nineteenth century littered with limousines, waterbeds and colour TVs, Flight to Canada is a surreal, madly funny satire on race in America. 'A satirical "neo-slave narrative", the novel wittily conjoins the past of slavery to the present of America's bicentennial' New York Review of Books

"An exhilarating mix of unpredictable points of view . . . there's real vitality in this anthology's crazy-quilt vision of America."-Kirkus Reviews Is there such a thing as "American" culture? No, says Ishmael Reed, the editor of this refreshing anthology and a longtime critic of the mainstream media which, he insists, marginalizes non-Anglo, non-Yankee cultures. In this impressive collection of dissenting voices, Reed and other African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Irish-Americans speak out against monoculturalism and provide perspectives from points of view frequently omitted from the discussion of race in the United States. Addressing a broad variety of issues-including assimilation; racial conflicts between minorities and within the gay rights movement; victimization; and stereotyping-these essays by notable writers, teachers, students, and professionals take us far beyond the issues of black vs. white and often veer toward the controversial. Stimulating, unpredictable, and provocative, Multi-America introduces the authentic voices of Rainbow America in all their diverse, angry, proud, celebratory glory. Contributors include: * Miguel Algarin * Amiri Baraka * Ana Castillo * Frank Chin * Earl Ofari Hutchinson * Jack Foley * Robert Elliot Fox * Daniela Gioseffi * Nathan Hare * Juan Felipe Herrera * Helen Barolini * Maulana Karenga * Martin Kilson * Elaine H. Kim * Bharati Mukherjee * Leslie Marmon Silko * Barbara Smith * Werner Sollors * Gerald Vizenor * William Wong

Celebrated novelist, poet, and MacArthur fellow Ishmael Reed pushes the boundaries once again in the publication of From Totems to Hip Hop--a truly all-inclusive multicultural anthology--a literary event which will finally even the playing field. This important collection synthesizes and presents broad swaths of work from poets of all races and backgrounds, as only Reed can, ranging from Gertrude Stein to Ai, from Bessie Smith to Askia Toure, from W. C. Handy to the little-known poetry of Ernest Hemingway. Through his unique position in American letters, as writer, teacher, and even publisher, Reed has an unparalleled working knowledge of many of the more marginalized voices in American poetry. This collection will reflect that unique access by including acknowledged masters as well as lesser known talents in greater variety than any previous anthology. From Totems to Hip Hop will cover American poetry from its pre-Columbian origins to the hip hop lyricists of today and, with the guidance of Reed's thoughtful and provocative introduction and headnotes, trace the remarkably rich cross-pollination which has continually occurred across racial and cultural lines.

The definitive guide to a major African American poet /> />This volume promises to be the definitive guide to Calvin C. Hernton's unparalleled poetic career, re-introducing readers to a major voice in American poetry. Hernton was a cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop; a participant in the Black Arts Movement, R. D. Laing's Kingsley Hall, and the Antiuniversity of London; and a teacher at Oberlin College who counted amongst his friends bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Odetta. As a pioneer in the field of Black Studies, Hernton developed a theoretical and practical pedagogy with lasting impact on generations of students. He may be best known as an anti-sexist sociologist, following in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois, but Hernton viewed himself, above all, as a poet. This volume includes a generous selection of Hernton's previously published poems, from classics like the often anthologized "The Distant Drum" to the visionary epic The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, reprinted in full for the first time since 1964, alongside uncollected and unpublished material from the Calvin C. Hernton papers at Ohio University, a new critical introduction, and detailed notes, chronology, and bibliography. /> />[sample poem] /> />The Distant Drum /> />I am not a metaphor or symbol. />This you hear is not the wind in the trees. />Nor a cat being maimed in the street. />I am being maimed in the street />It is I who weep, laugh, feel pain or joy. />Speak this because I exist. />This is my voice />These words are my words, my mouth />Speaks them, my hand writes. />I am a poet. />It is my fist you hear beating />Against your ear.