The Terrible Threes

Paperback
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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.

Details

ISBN-10 1-56478-224-7

ISBN-13 9781564782243

Publication Date Sep 1999

Nb of pages 192

Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5 in.

Onix

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Reviews

Press Reviews

New York Times

"One of the most inventive and prolific of contemporary American writes . . . Reed's prose style resembles the youthful Ali's ring style. It is unorthodox, brash, yet controlled."

Rolling Stone

"Ishmael Reed makes the language boogaloo."

Washington Post

"Reed is without a doubt our finest satirist since Mark Twain."

New York Times

"Like all great American comic spirits from Louis Armstrong to Curly Howard of the Three Stooges, from Richard Pryor to Zora Neal Hurston, Reed relentlessly deciphers his culture, subverts it really . . . The Terrible Threes seems a work that he could not avoid writing."

Publishers Weekly

"A jazzlike, surreal phantasmagoria . . . An uproarious, wisecracking, deadly serious farce . . . When Reed is on target, which is much of the time, he is one of the sharpest socio-political

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Booklist

"Reed, with undiminished fervor, forces readers to both laugh and cry over the less-than-noble ways and means of late-twentieth-century America. The novel is a scream—but sobering, too."

San Francisco Examiner

"Never a dull moment with Reed . . . even Reed's enemies place him in the canon of black male writers with Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Amiri Baraka."

Essence

"Reed's writing is fierce and funny . . . there's hardly a topic that escapes his scathing pen."

Chicago Tribune

"The only novelist who is a match for the comic intensity of Richard Pryor."

Quotations

"Hilarious! Race through this book in a public place only if you don't mind laughing and spitting on yourself in front of strangers."

-Trey Ellis author of Platitudes

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