UP FROM SLAVERYThe autobiography of Booker T Washington is a startling portrait ofone of the great Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The illegitimate son of 'a white man and a Negro slave, Washington, a man who struggled for hi
A compilation of some of The Atlantic’s most important writings on race and society over the past century and a half, featuring W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and m
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 wi
"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 d
Oakland is a blues city, brawling and husky . . .Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its twinkling sister city across the Bay, Oakland is itself an American wonder. The city is surrounded by and filled with natural beauty—mountains and hills and lakes
"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 th
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 propagat
"For all the talk of the black aesthetic, few black novelists have broken sharply with the traditional devices of the realistic novel. One writer who departs from such conventions, however, is Ishmael Reed. . . . The Free-Lance Pallbearers uses an expl
