14 Books Published by Dalkey Archive Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues by Ishmael Reed Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues

by Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive Press (Nov 03, 2020)
Read Detailed Book Description

The poems in this collection were written between 2007 and 2020. When asked to describe the poems here, Ishmael Reed wrote:

’ The poems are based on events that occurred around the house to cataclysmic space events. Some of the poems were commissioned. "Moving Richmond" was part of
a public art installation created by Mildred Howard. The poem, in huge letters forged into weathering steel billboards greets passengers who enter the new Bay Area mass transit hub in Richmond. Other poems were commissioned by musicians. "Hope Is The Thing With Feathers" was performed by Gregory Porter. "Red Summer, 2015" appeared in print first and then was set to music by David Murray. The longest poem in the book, "Jazz Martyrs," was begun when I learned about the number of black Jazz greats who didn’t live past the age of forty. I have been fortunate to live beyond the age of 80. I’ve found out who my best friends are. The ones who got me there.’


Click for more detail about Conjugating Hindi (galley) by Ishmael Reed Conjugating Hindi (galley)

by Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive Press (Apr 27, 2018)
Read Detailed Book Description

California is still the world’s biggest hideout. The only thing more western is the Pacific Ocean, where, if the Big One happens, California might find a home at the bottom.

One of those hiding out is Peter Bowman, a former army brat, and lecturer at Woodrow Wilson Community College, who is being hunted for a quality most men would crave. But for Bowman, nicknamed Boa, it has become burdensome. When an opportunity comes, he has to choose between becoming financially solvent or exposing himself to his pursuers. Along the way, he runs into some memorable characters both in reality and in his dreams, including Ishmael Reed. In Ishmael Reed’s Conjugating Hindi, stories, histories and myths of different cultures are mixed and sampled. Modern issues like gentrification addressed. It is the closest that a fiction writer has gotten to the hip-hop form on the page.

Once again, Ishmael Reed has pioneered a new form. If his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, was an early Afro-Futurist novel, Mumbo Jumbo recognized as "a graphic novel before we used the term" (according to Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson), Yellow Back Radio Broke Down Blazing Saddles’s "important precursor," Flight To Canada his "Neo Slave Narrative," a concept that he coined-Conjugating Hindi is his global novel. One that crosses all borders.


Click for more detail about Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (Catalan Literature) by Rowan Ricardo Phillips Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth (Catalan Literature)

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Dalkey Archive Press (Aug 28, 2012)
Read Detailed Book Description


One of the defining texts of twentieth-century Catalan fiction, written by one of its most innovative and cherished writers, Salvador Espriu’s "Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth" is a collection of thirty-four short stories in which the twists and turns of action, character, and place are as winding and sumptuous as the legendary maze of its title. Originally published in 1935 in the midst of great countrywide political and social upheaval, these stories are a mirror, a grotesque mirror, held up to Catalan and Spanish society. Infused with a deep sense of mythic power, blending social realism with lush modernist experiment, " Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth" is a triumph of style. Perhaps best known for his poetry, Espriu’s rich lyricism and highly evocative use of the Catalan language are here brought to life in the poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s remarkable English-language translation of a classic of world literature.


Click for more detail about Juice!: A Novel (American Literature Series) by Ishmael Reed Juice!: A Novel (American Literature Series)

by Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive Press (Apr 05, 2011)
Read Detailed Book Description


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.


Click for more detail about When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Dalkey Archive Scholarly) by Rowan Ricardo Phillips When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Dalkey Archive Scholarly)

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Dalkey Archive Press (Jul 20, 2010)
Read Detailed Book Description


In "When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness," Rowan Ricardo Phillips pushes African American poetry to its limits by unraveling "our desire to think of African American poetry as African American poetry." Phillips reads African American poetry as inherently allegorical and thus "a successful shorthand for the survival of a poetry but unsuccessful shorthand for the sustenance of its poems." Arguing in favor of the "counterintuitive imagination," Phillips demonstrates how these poems tend to refuse their logical insertion into a larger vision and instead dwell indefinitely at the crux between poetry and race, "where, when blackness rhymes with blackness, it is left for us to determine whether this juxtaposition contains a vital difference or is just mere repetition."


Click for more detail about Ishmael Reed: The Plays (American Literature) by Ishmael Reed Ishmael Reed: The Plays (American Literature)

by Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive Press (Sep 02, 2009)
Read Detailed Book Description


The award-winning plays of one of the most celebrated and innovative American writers of our time.


Click for more detail about The Presentable Art of Reading Absence by Jay Wright The Presentable Art of Reading Absence

by Jay Wright
Dalkey Archive Press (Apr 01, 2008)
Read Detailed Book Description

The Presentable Art of Reading Absence takes as impulse the act of meditation, in which the energetic relationship between a meditative body and its universe is not only the envisioning of absence by presence but also vision itself: Here begins the revelation of a kiosk. With occult emotionality and analytic brilliance, Jay Wright has written the user s guide to evanescence:
I have become attuned
to the disappearance of all things
and of my self…


Click for more detail about Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms and Praise for Lois by Jay Wright Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms and Praise for Lois

by Jay Wright
Dalkey Archive Press (Apr 01, 2008)
Read Detailed Book Description

A gift for his wife, Jay Wright s Polynomials and Pollen explores the complementary exigencies of abstraction and physicality. In five sections, each arranged under the aegis of a tutelary concept from the Yoruba, Akan, Bamana, and Nahuatl the book is a constellation of protophilosophical inquiry into notions of order, disarray, evidence, flowering, and return; it is also a dynamically visceral work whose feelingtones register rage as well as devotion.


Click for more detail about Reckless Eyeballing by Ishmael Reed Reckless Eyeballing

by Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive Press (Oct 01, 2000)
Read Detailed Book Description


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


Click for more detail about The Last Days of Louisiana Red: A Novel by Ishmael Reed The Last Days of Louisiana Red: A Novel

by Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive Press (May 01, 2000)
Read Detailed Book Description


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.


Click for more detail about Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

by Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive Press (May 01, 2000)
Read Detailed Book Description


“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.

In addition to the black, satanic Loop Garoo Kid, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down features Drag Gibson (a rich, slovenly cattleman), Mustache Sal (his nymphomaniac mail-order bride), Thomas Jefferson and many others in a hilarious parody of the old Western.


Click for more detail about The Terrible Threes by Ishmael Reed The Terrible Threes

by Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive Press (Sep 01, 1999)
Read Detailed Book Description


With offbeat humor and on-target social criticism, Ishmael Reed presents in "The Terrible Threes" a vision of America in the not-too-distant future, a portrait of a fairy tale gone awry. Opening on Thanksgiving Day in the late 1990s—three years after the former fashion-model president was laughed out of office for admitting that Saint Nicholas knew more about the workings of the executive branch than he did—the White House is implicated in a plot to rid America of its surplus people and the Third World of its nuclear weapons.


Click for more detail about The Free-Lance Pallbearers: A Novel by Ishmael Reed The Free-Lance Pallbearers: A Novel

by Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive Press (Sep 01, 1999)
Read Detailed Book Description


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).


Click for more detail about The Terrible Twos by Ishmael Reed The Terrible Twos

by Ishmael Reed
Dalkey Archive Press (Sep 01, 1999)
Read Detailed Book Description


"The Terrible Twos" is a wickedly funny, sharp-edged fictional assault on all those sulky, spoiled naysayers needing instant gratification—Americans. Ishmael Reed’s sixth novel depicts a zany, bizarre, and all-too believable future where mankind’s fate depends upon St. Nicholas and a Risto rasta dwarf named Black Peter, who together wreak mischievous havoc on Wall Street and in the Oval Office. This offbeat, on-target social critique makes marvelous fun of everything that is American, from commercialism to Congress, Santa Claus to religions cults.