In the following essay, Zamir delineates the major thematic concerns and influences behind Reed's seminal poem “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra.”

In the following essay, Rushdy explores the role of the Neo-HooDoo slave narrative in Flight to Canada, contending that the novel is Reed's “most considered aesthetic enactment of Neo-HooDoo religious principles and also his most sophisticated representation of the motivation governing his parodic impetus.”

In the following essay, Nazareth provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Reed's fiction, beginning with Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down.

In the following essay, Swope examines how Mumbo Jumbo fits into the genre of detective fiction.

In the following essay, Weixlmann compares the different qualities that Reed and Clarence Major bring to the genre of the novel.

In the following essay, Thomas identifies the major strengths and weaknesses of The Last Days of Louisiana Red, deeming the novel “thought-provoking, militantly bourgeois, and insanely funny.”

In the following essay, Hume examines Reed's treatment of control and power in his fiction and places him within the context of other writers dealing with similar thematic concerns.

In the following essay, Womack discusses the critical reaction to Japanese by Spring—particularly by university professors—noting that several critics failed to acknowledge Reed's attempts to “understand and embrace racial difference.”

In the following essay, Moraru examines the role of writing and rewriting in Reed's fiction, particularly as portrayed in Flight to Canada.

In the following essay, Melnick explores how Reed addresses gender and racial politics in Reckless Eyeballing.

In the following essay, Martin surveys the critical reaction to Reed's body of work as well as Reed's attitude toward his critics.

In the following essay, Ludwig addresses the critical confusion surrounding Reed's narrative technique in Mumbo Jumbo.

In the following essay, Davis examines how Reed's use of mythology in his fiction differentiates from similar works by several modernist authors.

In the following essay, Ludwig investigates the relationship between M. M. Bakhtin's theory of language and Reed's “Neo-HooDoo aesthetic,” focusing on the concepts of possession and the voodoo priest in Mumbo Jumbo.

In the following essay, McConnell explores the concept of “HooDoo” as a controlling metaphor in Reed's fiction.

In the following essay, Cowley argues that Reed's literary aesthetic is “expansive and inclusive,” contending that Reed is trying to establish a collective identity for America as well as a “diverse, plural space, in which ancient multisensory experience and modern technological resources may combine to engender vital and creative cultural formations.”

In the following essay, Ambler contends that the major thematic concerns of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down can be found in his poem “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra.”

In the following essay, Martin provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Reed's fiction, focusing on his linguistic metaphors.

In the following essay, Bryant praises Reed's synthesis of history and fiction in Mumbo Jumbo, placing the novel within the context of Reed's other fictional work.

I like Ishmael Reed. There is so much of him. He is going on forty-six at the time I write, is still healthy and pugnacious, and has already incarnated himself in more forms than two normal men do in a lifetime…. Not everyone likes him as much as I do. Some call him too conservative. Some call him unreadable. Some call him silly and superficial. But he is so active and productive in so many fields of contemporary American art that he cannot be ignored. In the late sixties, when he was one of a couple...

In the following essay, Green discusses how Reed's The Last Days of Louisiana Red functions as a work of social commentary.

In the following interview, Reed discusses his past, his body of work, and his opinions regarding fiction and feminism.

Central to understanding Ishmael Reed's fiction is an analysis of the ways in which he creates and uses literary folklore. It has for him dual purposes: it is practical and theoretical. Practically it serves to advance the plot, provide structure, defend and raise questions about the nature of society. Theoretically it has at its disposal a vast and largely untapped reservoir of African and Afro-American history, folklore and myth. The components of the practical and theoretical categories are intric...

In the following essay, Weixlmann investigates the influence of the Tlingit myth and Edgar Allan Poe's “The Raven” on Reed's Flight to Canada.

In The Terrible Twos Reed is supposedly outside of history; he sets his story in 1990, when the President is a former male model, the economy is worse than ever, and all that's left to trickle down is Christmas, which a bunch of power-hungry goons who run the country successfully buy and sell. God Made Alaska for the Indians, on the other hand, assembles eight essays and an afterword on environmentalists, Native Americans, literary politicians, prize fight promotions, male sexuality, race relations, ...

In the following essay, Abel offers a critical reading of Reed's poem “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra.”

Who or what is the poet Ishmael? An intellectual anti-intellectual. A religious opponent of religion. A duelling pacifist. A black antagonist champion of blacks. A poet influenced by Yeats, Pound, Blake, and the Umbra poets. A Black Arts poet who attacks Black Arts critics and poets. A satirical creator of myths. An ideologue who derides ideologies. A poet who ranges in allusion from Nixon to Wotan and Osiris. A poet of the topical and the ancient. A poet ignored in Stephen Henderson's trenchant anal...

In the following negative review, Packer contrasts the treatment of race in Reed's Airing Dirty Laundry and Cornel West's Keeping the Faith.

In the following review, Formento discusses the controversial subject matter of Airing Dirty Laundry.

In the following review of Japanese by Spring, Bankston asserts that, despite some flaws in the narrative, “Reed's enormous gift for social satire enables him to get away with breaking many of the normal rules of fiction.”

In the following review, Rubin offers a mixed assessment of Japanese by Spring, faulting Reed for his “inability to comprehend the pervasive oppression of women in almost every culture.”

The American search for a usable past began with our first writers. American historians, cultural critics, and artists have repeatedly rewritten our history in response to evolving philosophies and social issues. And novelist, both serious and popular, have followed close behind, infusing fictional human relations with historical reality to cultivate—or to create—myths about our past. The old, tenacious forms of historical fiction either glamorize the past, reinforcing old myths of greatness, ...

I find myself with a troublesome voice sounding off warnings about what I should and should not say about Ishmael Reed's new novel, The Terrible Twos. And I wonder to what extent that voice is a phantom of white liberal guilt I thought I had exorcised. Exorcism is a good place to begin with Reed. He is the darling of a number of new fiction critics who see him as the all-purpose literary necromancer, the black shaman who conjures vital new myths against the backdrop of the dead carcass of white weste...

It is a mistake to see any one black writer as representative of the "black experience" (whatever that is), and it is even a greater mistake to pin a label on a writer like Ishmael Reed. His name is appropriate—he is a genuine maverick. As a critic of American culture, he has taken on smug feminists, omniscient white scholars (who know Negro literature), and con men of all colors, creeds, and sexes…. As a writer (poet and novelist), Reed belongs to no "school" of Af...

In the following review of Japanese by Spring, Nazareth praises Reed's humorous satire and the topicality of his subject matter.

Tom-ing is such a normal thing, particularly in its urban capitol—New York—that one is sometimes shocked when a man, particularly a black man, decides not only to refuse to tom, but goes on the offensive, which, in the literary world, can mean muckraking. Ishmael Reed is such a man, and his most recent book Shrovetide in Old New Orleans…, is a collection of often bitter essays, reviews, and interviews that attack institutions and personages most black artists fume about in private and p...

Among novelists writing today, Reed ranks in the top of those commanding a brilliant set of resources and techniques. The prose is flexible, easy in its shift of gears and capacity to move on a variety of levels. The techniques of the cartoon, the caricature, the vaudevillean burlesque, the straight narrative, the detective story, are summoned at will. But his management of his resources in The Last Days of Louisiana Red fails to create a lasting or deep impression. The novel deals with areas which afford r...

The trouble with The Terrible Twos is that [Reed has] said it all before and said it much better. This time out, he's picked another genre to tear apart with his imposition of varied forms and combinations of perspective. Just as he used Antigone in The Last Days of Louisiana Red to create a brilliant satire that collapsed under the strain of its near-misogyny, and just as he used the western for Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, the detective story for Mumbo Jumbo, the slave narrative and Uncle Tom�...

The notion that contemporary America—with its movie-star President, passion for military hardware, increasing polarization of haves and have-nots—is as politically mature as a 2-year-old child is socially adept, would seem a thin enough idea on which to peg a novel. But while Ishmael Reed's sixth book of fiction, "The Terrible Twos," takes its title from this notion, and some paragraphs are devoted to developing it, this one theme does not begin to exhaust what the novel i...

In the following review, Thompson compliments Reed's discussion of how the media portrays African Americans in Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the Race War, but notes that some African Americans may object to Reed's arguments.

Flight to Canada is, of all things, a comic exploration of slavery by the best black writer around. The novel is genuinely funny, Ishmael (Scott) Reed 1938– © Thomas Victor 1984for Reed has not rendered faithfully the horrors of servitude but rather created a grotesque Civil War America out of scraps and snippets of the past, the present and the mythic. In the process he has put together a brilliant montage of scenes, potent wi...

The Terrible Twos is the latest in the series of pop-art novels … which, with their bizarre inventions and liveliness of language, have won for Reed a small but vociferous following. The book takes its title from the well-known proclivities of toddlers, aged two, who, according to the novel's fake Santa Claus, set the standard of maturity for our great republic: "Two years old, that's what we are, emotionally—America, always wanting someone to hand us some ice...

["Flight to Canada"] is a demonized "Uncle Tom's Cabin," a book that reinvents the particulars of slavery in America with a comic rage. Reed has little use for statistical realities. He is a necromancer, a believer in the voodoos of art. Time becomes a modest, crazy fluid in Reed's head, allowing him to mingle events of the last 150 years, in order to work his magic. We have Abe Lincoln and the Late Show, slave catchers and "white-frosted Betty Crocker glossy...

[Reed] has emerged as one of the more promising and prolific of the current young black writers in America. [Shrovetide in Old New Orleans] (articles, reviews, open letters, speeches and interviews) seems to represent everything that Reed has ever published. Such over-inclusion (some less worthy material) must relate to Reed's calling this collection "an autobiography of my mind starting in about 1970." In his introduction Reed answers those critics who have called his fiction "m...

Ishmael Reed's new novel, Flight to Canada, is high and wild comedy, sometimes funny, too often forced, acknowledging a painful life, but not deriving from it…. The time is the Civil War, but the jokes are contemporary—jokes about history, religion, education and politics, which are merely okay; and literary jokes which are better by inches…. Reed's central literary joke is also his most sober point: the impossibility of escape (flight) from bondage except by way of onesel...

Blacks and whites, avant-garde and mass culture, politics, even Reed's alma mater, the University of Buffalo, have their turn [in The Free-Lance Pall Bearers], Features of the Gothic novel superimposed on an already flimsy plot do not help matters much…. The attempt to turn Bukka [Reed's anti-hero] into a revolutionary ten pages from the end … seems tacked on and insignificant. I know that it was not a last-minute device to wrap up the story because I had the opportunity to read ...

Testimonials from weighty sources declare Mr. Reed a comic master; he himself announces his style to be "literary neohoodooism"; and I can only crustily say that I read him without a guffaw, without a laugh, without a cackle, without the shade of a smile. Packed with Mad Magazine silliness though his work is, Mr. Reed has one saving virtue: he is hopelessly good-natured. He may intend his books as a black variation of Jonathan Swift, but they emerge closer to the commercial cooings of Captain ...

Ishmael Reed can hardly be called a camp follower. [The Free-Lance Pall Bearers] inverts conventional attitudes for sustained comic effect; his feints are brilliant and his punches swift…. [However], he is prone to rely on the injoke, and to join in a growing army of writers who "grotest" too much. This army is losing some of its power to surprise. (p. 508) Martin Tucker, in Commonweal (copyright © 1968 Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of Comm...