Literary Significance and Reception
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down was received with varied criticisms: "Neil Schmitz, in an essay on Reed's fiction in Twentieth Century Literature (Apr. 1974), judged Yellow Back Radio to exhibit a “simplistic” focus and “diffused” energy, although many readers found it to be a comic tour de force."
- "Ishmael Reed is a most talented humorist and possessor of a powerfully antic and lyric imagination...Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down should be read as hard evidence of Reed's uncommon talent." The New Yorker
- "Ishmael Reed has mastered the vocabulary of blasphemy. He skins all our sacred cows." Life Magazine
- "Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a full blown 'horse opera,' a surrealistic spoof of the Western with Indian chiefs aboard helicopters, stagecoaches and closed circuit TVs, cavalry charges of taxis." New York Review of Books
Read more about this topic: Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or reception:
“The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination.... To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)