Ishmael Reed has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Mumbo Jumbo.
Mumbo Jumbo
Summary
Ishmael Reed's inspired fable of the ragtime era, in which a social movement threatens to suppress the spread of black culture - hailed by Harold Bloom as one of the 500 greatest books of the Western canon In 1920s America, a plague is spreading fast. From New Orleans to Chicago to New York, the "Jes Grew" epidemic makes people desperate to dance, overturning social norms in the process. Anyone is vulnerable and when they catch it, they'll bump and grind into a frenzy. Working to combat the Jes Grew infection are the puritanical Atonists, a group bent on cultivating a "Talking Android", an African American who will infiltrate the unruly black communities and help crush the outbreak. But PaPa LaBas, a houngan voodoo priest, is determined to keep his ancient culture - including a key spiritual text - alive. Spanning a dizzying host of genres, from cinema to academia to mythology, Mumbo Jumbo is a lively ride through a key decade of American history. In addition to ragtime, blues, and jazz, Reed's allegory draws on the Harlem Renaissance, the Back to Africa movement, and America's occupation of Haiti. His style throughout is as avant-garde and vibrant as the music at its center.
©1972 Ishmael Reed (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
The Fool Who Thought Too Much
Summary
It’s tough to be a buffoon when the Age of Reason is trying to downsize your job. When the King’s Fool dies unexpectedly, a professional buffoon tries to move up the ranks and grab the top slot. But the politics involved in becoming a court jester are no laughing matter. The rules of becoming the top fool are simple: The winner is the one who performs the most outrageous act. Our buffoon and his fellows struggle for supremacy in a profession that is heading for extinction. Ishmael Reed is a playwright, poet, and author of such groundbreaking novels as Mumbo Jumbo and Reckless Eyeballing as well as the best-selling Audible Original Malcolm and Me. Now the acclaimed writer returns to the form that introduced him to reading when he was a child: fairy tales.
©2020 Ishmael Reed (P)2020 Audible Originals, LLC.
Juice!
Summary
A new novel from the most outspoken African American writer of our time. In 2010, the Newseum in Washington D.C. finally obtained the suit O. J. Simpson wore in court the day he was acquitted, and it now stands as both an artifact in their "Trial of the Century" exhibit and a symbol of the American media’s endless hunger for the criminal and the celebrity. This event serves as a launching point for Ishmael Reed’s Juice!, a novelistic commentary on the post-Simpson American media frenzy from one of the most controversial figures in American literature today. Through Paul Blessings - a censored cartoonist suffering from diabetes - and his cohorts - serving as stand-ins for the various mediums of art - Ishmael Reed argues that since 1994, "O. J. has become a metaphor for things wrong with culture and politics." A lament for the death of print media, the growth of the corporation, and the process of growing old, Juice! serves as a comi-tragedy, chronicling the increased anxieties of "post-race" America.
©2011 Ishmael Reed (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Flight to Canada
Summary
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).
©1976 Ishmael Reed (P)2013 Audible, Inc.