Juice! - (American Literature) by Ishmael Reed (Paperback)

About the Book

A new novel from the most outspoken African-American writer of our time.

Book Synopsis

A lament for the death of print media, the growth of the corporation, and the process of growing old, Juice! serves as a tragi-comedy chronicling the increased anxieties of "post-race" America.

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 as 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 the figure 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."

Review Quotes

"Seemingly tired of arguments about 'identity politics', and being forced "to rally around the flag of black brotherhood', Reed's mischievous energetic prose transforms Juice! into an engaging, troubling and innovative novel." --The Times Literary Supplement

"...a genuinely inventive novel, which depends not on people in catharsis but on the pleasures of the riffing itself, which allows Reed to address, with savvy variety, all the foibles of a country kidding itself about 'the world of post-race harmony and sunlight.'" --Bookforum

About the Author

Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Juice!. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism as he calls it. Founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over thirty years until his retirement in 2005. In 2003, he received the coveted Otto Award for political theater.