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Oreo
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Published:
New Directions 2015
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Description

A pioneering, dazzling satire about a biracial black girl from Philadelphia searching for her Jewish father in New York City


Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
07/07/2015
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780811223232
ASIN:
B00PE31J3A
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Fran Ross. (2015). Oreo. New Directions.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Fran Ross. 2015. Oreo. New Directions.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Fran Ross, Oreo. New Directions, 2015.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Fran Ross. Oreo. New Directions, 2015.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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d7886dba-9352-abbb-c13e-c725472b0c53
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 15:26:25
Date Updated:
Jun 12, 2018 15:26:25
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 28, 2024 09:36:26
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        Fran Ross (1935–1985) grew up in Philadelphia. She wrote Oreo while working as a proofreader and journalist, and then moved to Los Angeles to write for Richard Pryor.

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publishDate
2015-07-07T00:00:00-04:00
isOwnedByCollections
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title
Oreo
fullDescription

A pioneering, dazzling satire about a biracial black girl from Philadelphia searching for her Jewish father in New York City

Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Marlon James;Guardian
      • content: Oreo buzzes with whip-smart comic ferocity. The book is just goddamn funny. Oreo laughs in the face of the American one-drop ideal of whiteness that produces Oreos in the first place. It revels in yet mocks its own hybridity, and that of the characters. It pulls off the unique trick of slapping white supremacy in the face, while never letting go of the ideal of (and the desire for) whiteness itself. The novel's constant dialectical tension recalls jazz itself. Free jazz, intentionally playing with poetry and cacophony, music and noise, meaning and nonsense, black and Jewish. It's a novel that reads as the smartest and wildest conversation you've ever had, with the friend that's too smart for her own good. Oreo's time is most certainly now. Because, more than ever, with the real world skidding off into madness, absurdity and chaos, this crazy, sexy, cool novel now makes perfect sense.
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus (Starred Review)
      • content: A brilliant and biting satire, a feminist picaresque, absurd, unsettling, and hilarious ... Ross' novel, with its Joycean language games and keen social critique, is as playful as it is profound. Criminally overlooked. A knockout.
      • premium: False
      • source: Danielle Dutton;The Guardian
      • content: Setting out from her black household in Philadelphia to find her deadbeat Jewish father in New York, [Oreo] proceeds through one of the funniest journeys ever, amid a whirlwind of wisecracks in a churning mix of Yiddish, black vernacular, and every sort of English.
      • premium: False
      • source: Paul Auster;The New York Times
      • content: What a rollicking little masterpiece this book is, truly one of the most delightful, hilarious, intelligent novels I've stumbled across in recent years, a wholly original work written in a wonderful mashed-up language that mixes high academic prose, black slang and Yiddish to great effect. I must have laughed out loud a hundred times, and it's a short book, just over 200 pages, which averages out to one booming gut-laugh every other page.
      • premium: False
      • source: Mat Johnson;NPR Books
      • content: Oreo is one of the funniest books I've ever read. To convey Oreo's humor effectively, I would have to use the comedic graphs, menus, and quizzes Ross uses in the novel. So instead, I just settle for, 'You have to read this.'
      • premium: False
      • source: Harryette Mullen
      • content: With its mix of vernacular dialects, bilingual and ethnic humor, inside jokes, neologisms, verbal quirks, and linguistic oddities, Ross's novel dazzles...
      • premium: False
      • source: Paul Beatty;The New York Times
      • content: It took me two years to "feel" Wu Tang's first album, even longer to appreciate Basquiat, and I still don't get all the fuss over Duke Ellington and Frank Lloyd Wright. But I couldn't believe Oreo hadn't been on my cultural radar.
      • premium: False
      • source: Vanity Fair
      • content: Hilarious, touching and a future classic.
      • premium: False
      • source: John Warner;Chicago Tribune
      • content: Think: Thomas Pynchon meets Don Quixote, mixed with a crack joke crafter. I'm not sure I've ever admired a book's inventiveness and soul more.
      • premium: False
      • source: Amanda Sarasien;The Literary Review
      • content: The novel will endure, greeting each new generation of readers with its continuing relevance.
      • premium: False
      • source: Essence Magazine
      • content: Hilariously offbeat.
      • premium: False
      • source: Dwight Garner;The New York Times
      • content: Oreo has snap and whimsy to burn. It's a nonstop outbound flight to a certain kind of readerly bliss. It may have been first published more than 40 years ago, but its time is now.
      • premium: False
      • source: Stephen Sparks;LitHub
      • content: Uproariously funny...criminally neglected.
      • premium: False
      • source: Dwight Garner;The New York Times
      • content: This novel has wings.
      • premium: False
      • source: Susan Choi;Bookforum
      • content: I wish that more writers writing today would be as outrageous, irreverent, and just flat-out funny about race as Fran Ross was in Oreo almost fifty years ago.
      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        Starred review from May 15, 2015
        A biracial girl brought up by her black grandparents sets off on a quest to find her long-lost Jewish father in Ross' brilliant and biting satire. Helen "Honeychile" Clark and Samuel Schwartz met, married (over the mutual disapproval of their parents), and divorced before their daughter Oreo's second birthday. With Helen, a pianist, away on perpetual tour and Samuel generally absent, Oreo (real name: Christine) and her brother, Jimmie C. (real name: Moishe), are raised by their maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. But while Oreo's father has disappeared almost entirely from his daughter's life ("he's a schmuck," Helen explains, when Oreo asks), he's left behind one thing: a note, delivered to Helen and intended for the future Christine. When she "is old enough to decipher the clues written on this piece of paper," he says, "send her to me and I will reveal to her the secret of her birth." And so, after a precocious childhood, during which she's steeped in language-Yiddish from her grandfather (a committed anti-Semite, his business is selling outrageously overpriced mail-order schlock to Jews); English from her tutor, a "renowned linguist and blood donor"; and "Louise-ese," the distinct dialect of her grandmother, to name a few-Oreo leaves home, lunch packed, to embark upon her mission: find her father, learn the secret. Transforming the myth of Theseus and the Labyrinth into a feminist picaresque, Ross sends Oreo into the heart of New York City, where, in a series of absurd, unsettling, and hilarious encounters-no one is safe from Ross' razor-sharp deconstruction-she inches ever closer to her own origin story. Oreo's identity is always in flux, as she performs various personas to suit her situations, switching between registers with superhuman skill. First published in 1974 and now reissued in paperback, Ross' novel, with its Joycean language games and keen social critique, is as playful as it is profound. Criminally overlooked. A knockout.

        COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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shortDescription

A pioneering, dazzling satire about a biracial black girl from Philadelphia searching for her Jewish father in New York City

Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other.
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      • description: Fiction / African American & Black / Women
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      • description: Fiction / Satire