
The Free-Lance Pallbearers
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Narrated by:
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Rodney Gardiner
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By:
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Ishmael Reed
About this listen
Ishmael Reed's electrifying first novel zooms readers off to the crazy, ominous kingdom of HARRY SAM - a miserable and dangerous place ruled for thirty years by Harry Sam, a former used car salesman who wields his power from his bathroom throne. In a land of a thousand contradictions peopled by cops and beatniks, black nationalists and white liberals, the crusading Bukka Doopeyduk leads a rebellion against the corrupt Sam in a wildly uproarious and scathing satire, earning the author the right to be dubbed "the brightest contributor to American satire since Mark Twain" (The Nation).
©1967 Ishmael Reed (P)2012 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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BEEN THERE, DID THAT, GOT A T-SHIRT TO PROVE IT!
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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.
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Next Level.
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It's the 1980s and the politics of the New York theater scene have taken yet another turn.
Masochism is out and feminism is in, Jews are out and Germans are in, race is out and gender is in, and everyone's fighting (and rewriting) for a piece of the pie. In this hilarious, devastating, but also deeply sympathetic novel, Ishmael Reed turns characters on their backs, sides, tops and bottoms to expose the multiple hypocrisies at the heart of American culture.
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Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.
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- By: Ishmael Reed
- Narrated by: Rodney Gardiner
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
"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 the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head to the Executioner's swine." And so begins the HooDoo Western by Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo and one of America's most innovative and celebrated writers. Reed demolishes white American history and folklore as well as Christian myth in this masterful satire of contemporary American life.
-
-
Liberating the Masses
- By Darwin8u on 12-15-16
By: Ishmael Reed
-
The Last Days of Louisiana Red
- By: Ishmael Reed
- Narrated by: Rodney Gardiner
- Length: 4 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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 propagated by Louisiana Red and those militant opportunists, the Moochers. A HooDoo detective story and a comprehensive satire on the explosive politics of the '60s, The Last Days of Louisiana Red exposes the hypocrisy of contemporary American culture and race politics.
-
-
BEEN THERE, DID THAT, GOT A T-SHIRT TO PROVE IT!
- By The Louligan on 01-19-14
By: Ishmael Reed
-
Flight to Canada
- By: Ishmael Reed
- Narrated by: Vince Bailey
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Next Level.
- By A. SAID on 10-25-19
By: Ishmael Reed
-
Reckless Eyeballing
- By: Ishmael Reed
- Narrated by: Rodney Gardiner
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's the 1980s and the politics of the New York theater scene have taken yet another turn.
Masochism is out and feminism is in, Jews are out and Germans are in, race is out and gender is in, and everyone's fighting (and rewriting) for a piece of the pie. In this hilarious, devastating, but also deeply sympathetic novel, Ishmael Reed turns characters on their backs, sides, tops and bottoms to expose the multiple hypocrisies at the heart of American culture.
By: Ishmael Reed
-
Mumbo Jumbo
- A Novel
- By: Ishmael Reed
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Interesting for Political & Cultural Influence
- By Tom on 03-01-20
By: Ishmael Reed
-
The Din of Celestial Birds
- By: Brian Evenson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Beville
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.
By: Brian Evenson
Critic reviews
"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 explosive combination of straightforward English prose, exaggerated black dialect, hip jargon, advertising slogans and long, howling uppercase screams." (Newsweek)
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