Reckless Eyeballing - Softcover

Reed, Ishmael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564782379 ISBN 13: 9781564782373

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000

Synopsis

It's the 1980s and the politics of the New York theater scene have taken yet another turn.

About this title

About the Author:

Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Juice!. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism as he calls it. Founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. In 2003, he received the coveted Otto Award for political theater.

From Publishers Weekly:

A Jewish stage director is killed by a mob of anti-Semitic "Christians," a black female playwright flees the New York celebrity rat race, a young Caribbean playwright becomes a huge (but, he realizes, hollow) success, a masked black man shaves feminists' heads, an Archie Bunkerish Irishman sees the lightand yet nothing much seems to happen in Reed's (Mumbo Jumbo latest satire. Most of the book is devoted to long monologues by various characters against "the enemy": black men, black women, sexists, feminists, Jews, gentiles and occasional combinations. There is one hilarious scene, however, concerning a play that seeks to rehabilitate Eva Braun (portrayed as a victim like everyone else). The view of life at the top in a British colony in the Caribbean is devastating in its depiction of how rotten the ruling class can be to its own people. At the book's dreamy end, novelist-playwright-poet Reed seems to agree with Pogo: the enemy is us.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1564782379
• ISBN 13: 9781564782373
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 148