Ishmael Reed continues his forty-year prophetic book project, The Terribles, brilliantly laying bare a country where truth and fiction are always trading places.
Terminte Control, the leading presidential candidate, is a necrophiliac and an Odin worshipper. He vows to both replace the English language with Old Norse, and tear down the Washington monument in favour of a golden statue of the Norse god.
Meanwhile, bear skin and horned helmets replace conventional business wear, and the rest of the world is convinced that America has lost its mind. They're not wrong.
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Fifty years after his novel Flight to Canada was published, Ishmael Reed introduces The Terrible Fives with the hard-hitting and revelatory essay "My Flight to Canada." The author of "Writin' is Fightin'" takes us through the often no-exit labyrinth of publishing and writing in the United States, and casts new light on great writers he collaborated with, including Toni Morrison, Adrienne Kennedy, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, and more.
Ishmael Reed has authored fifty works of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, plays and librettos, and edited numerous anthologies. Recent works include Blind Persistence, The History of the Before Columbus Foundation (Baraka Books, 2025), Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues (2022), and The Terrible Fours (Baraka Books, 2021). Former professor at The University of California at Berkeley, Reed lives in Oakland.
Reviews and praise
"Ishmael Reed's The Terrible Fives with 'My Flight to Canada' and my book Eyes Have Seen, From Mississippi to Montreal meet at a central truth: the United States cannot escape the history it refuses to see. From the buried realities of the past to racial and political contradictions of the present, these books challenge the stories that make injustice invisible. Reed answers with satire-hilarious! Eyes Have Seen answers with witness. Together, they remind us that what has been suppressed does not disappear-it returns, demanding to be seen."-Fred Anderson, author of Eyes Have Seen, From Mississippi to Montreal (2025)
