The Last Days of Louisiana Red - Softcover

Reed, Ishmael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0689707312 ISBN 13: 9780689707315

Publisher: Atheneum, 1989

Synopsis

First published in 1974, this highly acclaimed literary achievement exposes in metaphor the hypocrisy by which the contemporary political and social scene simultaneously betrays and characterizes itself.

About this title

About the Author

Ishmael Reed (b. 1938) is an acclaimed multifaceted writer whose work often engages with overlooked aspects of the American experience. He has published ten novels, including Flight to Canada and Mumbo Jumbo, as well as plays and collections of essays and poetry. He was nominated for a National Book Award in both poetry and prose in 1972. Conjure (1972), a volume of poetry, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and his New and Collected Poems: 1964–2006 (2007) received a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. Reed has also received a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Blues Song Writer of the Year award from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame, a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the National Institute for Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Reed taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for thirty-five years and currently lives in Oakland, California.

Review

“Reed can hardly be accused of eye rolling and cakewalking for his supper. His angers and resentments are sheathed in intelligence, learning, scatological wit and showmanship. One thinks of Redd Foxx ...more before he was Sanfordized . . . Reed's approach to the novel is not unlike a Dixieland band's approach to music: a native American diversity that adds up to a unified style—authentic and endlessly fresh.” (Time)

“Funky, hip, and cool . . . The language is re-cycled garbage that sometimes, amazingly, becomes poetry and almost always is authentic, alive.” (Choice)

“This is a very alive novel of living folklore; sometimes Reed's prose feels like walking through a field teeming with wild game which jumps out from under your feet.” (Village Voice)

“This novel disguised as a verbal comic strip is brilliant and funny.” (Library Journal)

“Reed at his bravura best in the use of language and parody.” (Publishers Weekly)

“A tangle of allusions, an allegorical puzzle that keeps the mind on its toes . . . Mr. Reed exercises in jokes and wisecracks, scholarship and satire. All of which makes for a frenetic form of vaudeville show.” (The New York Times)

“Ishmael Reed has a shrewd eye, a mean ear, a nasty tongue . . . He attacks self-serving hypocrisy wherever he finds it . . . We may be horrified or amused—or both. But we are too fascinated to go away.” (The New York Times Book Review)

Edition details

• Publisher: Atheneum
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0689707312
• ISBN 13: 9780689707315
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 177