Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed - ISBN: 9780241305812
Paperback
Jazz is a virus, and the world must dance or die.

$39.53

  • Paperback

    224 pages

  • Release Date

    15 August 2017

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Summary

Ishmael Reed’s inspired comic fable of the ragtime era - hailed by Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred greatest books of the Western canon

America, 1920s. A plague is spreading, and it’s spreading fast, from New Orleans to Chicago to New York. It’s an epidemic of freedom, joy and self-expression, being spread by Black artists, that makes anyone who catches it desperate to dance, sing, laugh and jive. It’s the outbreak of Jazz, Ragtime and Blues onto the world scene; the spirit of …

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780241305812
ISBN-10:0241305810
Author:Ishmael Reed
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Imprint:Penguin Classics
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:224
Release Date:15 August 2017
Weight:200g
Dimensions:198mm x 129mm x 18mm
Series:Penguin Modern Classics
What They're Saying

Critics Review

Ishmael Reed’s extraordinary and expansive collage novel [is] a conduit for his surging torrent of interrelating arguments about race, religion, history, music and literature … it reminds readers of the charged relationship between medium and message, issuing an avant-garde challenge to read and to think as innovatively as they way in which the novel is written. Mumbo Jumbo is urgent, imaginative, hilarious, and deeply attuned to the exigencies of social and cultural capital. – Rona Cran * Times Literary Supplement *
A dazzling classic … exhilarating … like jazz, the novel feels improvisatory and ambitious […] It is a funny book about conspiracy theories that nonetheless feels serious and true. A philosophical and ingenious American race satire – Guardian

About The Author

Ishmael Reed

Novelist, poet, playwright, songwriter, essayist, activist and MacArthur genius, Ishmael Reed has been a major figure in American letters for the past four decades. His ground-breaking literary output has inspired generations of artists and writers and he is widely recognized as one of the great American writers.

Reed was born in 1938. He grew up in working-class neighbourhoods in Buffalo, New York, attended Buffalo public schools, and the University of Buffalo. He taught at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and, for thirty-five years, at the University of California Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, California, where he teaches at the California College of the Arts.

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