Bill Caraher | 

There are a lot of things going on the world these days, but I still hope there’s time to appreciate the work of Ishmael Reed, particularly his novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972). For reasons best left unsaid, I’ve been reading around about Mumbo Jumbo over the last few weeks (and attempting to conjure some idea of what this novel can say to us today).

I noticed a few citations to an article by Mark Shadle and when I finally looked at it in various bibliographies, I was surprised (and a bit humbled) to see that it appeared in NDQ (albeit long before my editorial term!).

This seemed like as good an opportunity as any to check out Mark Shadle’s “A Bird’s Eye View: Ishmael Reed Unsettling the Score by Munching and Mooching on the Mumbo Jumbo Work of History” in NDQ 54.1 (1986).

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Bill Caraher is the editor of NDQ.