Mumbo Jumbo

A plague is spreading across 1920s America, racing from New Orleans to New York. It's an epidemic of free expression, carried by black artists, and its symptoms are an uncontrollable urge to dance, sing, laugh and jive. The state will stop at nothing to suppress the outbreak, but, deep in the heart of Harlem, private eye and Vodum priest Papa LaBas has other ideas - and, possibly, the key to everything. A freewheeling, explosive blend of jazz, ragtime, ancient myth, magic and conspiracy thriller, this anarchic postmodern classic is a satire for our times.


Praise:

"A great writer" - James Baldwin

"Part vision, part satire, part farce ... a wholly original, unholy cross between the craft of fiction and witchcraft" - The New York Times

"Ishmael Reed's extraordinary and expansive collage novel [is] a conduit for his surging torrent of interrelating arguments about race, religion, history, music and literature ... it reminds readers of the charged relationship between medium and message, issuing an avant-garde challenge to read and to think as innovatively as they way in which the novel is written. Mumbo Jumbo is urgent, imaginative, hilarious, and deeply attuned to the exigencies of social and cultural capital." - Rona Cran, Times Literary Supplement

"A dazzling classic ... exhilarating ... like jazz, the novel feels improvisatory and ambitious [...] It is a funny book about conspiracy theories that nonetheless feels serious and true. A philosophical and ingenious American race satire" - Guardian