Sherman Alexie offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant stories about Native Americans who find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads. In 'The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above', an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her, to the bewilderment of her only child.
Leaving the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white high school, Junior struggles to find his place in his new surroundings in order to escape his destiny back on the reservation. 75,000 first printing.
A New York Times bestseller--over one million copies sold A National Book Award winner A Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner Bestselling and award winning author Sherman Alexie tells the hearbreaking yet funny story about a boy living on the Spokane Indian Reservation who wants to break free of the life he was destined to live. Junior is a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, based on the author's own experiences and coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.
Thunder Boy Jr. is named after his dad, but he wants a name that's all his own. Just because people call his dad Big Thunder doesn't mean he wants to be Little Thunder. He wants a name that celebrates something cool he's done, like Touch the Clouds, Not Afraid of Ten Thousand Teeth, or Full of Wonder.But just when Thunder Boy Jr. thinks all hope is lost, he and his dad pick the perfect name...a name that is sure to light up the sky.National Book Award-winner Sherman Alexie's lyrical text and Caldecott Honor-winner Yuyi Morales's striking and beautiful illustrations celebrate the special relationship between father and son.
The Instant New York Times Bestseller One of the most anticipated books of 2017--Entertainment Weekly and Bustle A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, loss, and forgiveness from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most. She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the affection that they so desperately craved. She wanted a better life for her son, but it was only by leaving her behind that he could hope to achieve it. It's these contradictions that made Lillian Alexie a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated, and very human woman. When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is a stunning memoir filled with raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine, much less survive. An unflinching and unforgettable remembrance, YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME is a powerful, deeply felt account of a complicated relationship.
Ball games, cars, and romances: the icons and battlefields of modern life. In twenty-two linked stories, with infinite humour and pathos, Sherman Alexie explores some of the major issues of our time: the pull between the urban and the rural, the future and the past;
Robert Johnson, legendary blues man, arrives at the Spokane Reservation looking for relief. So, with Victor Joseph, Junior Polatkin and Chess and Checkers Warm Water, he hits the road, taking their four-and-a-half-chord rock and blues band to reservation bars, small town taverns, and the urban landscapes of Seattle and Manhattan.
Sherman Alexie's stature as a writer of stories, poems, and novels has soared over the course of his twenty-book, twenty-year career. His wide-ranging, acclaimed stories from the last two decades, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven to his most recent PEN/Faulkner award-winning War Dances, have established him as a star in modern literature. A bold and irreverent observer of life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, the daring, versatile, funny, and outrageous Alexie showcases all his talents in his newest collection, Blasphemy, where he unites fifteen beloved classics with fifteen new stories in one sweeping anthology for devoted fans and first-time readers. Included here are some of his most esteemed tales, including "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," "The Toughest Indian in the World," and "War Dances." Alexie's new stories are fresh and quintessential-about donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, the reservation, marriage, and all species of contemporary American warriors.An indispensable collection of new and classic stories, Blasphemy reminds us, on every thrilling page, why Sherman Alexie is one of our greatest contemporary writers and a true master of the short story.
"Alexie once again reasserts himself as one the most compelling contemporary practitioners of the short story. In Blasphemy, the author demonstrates his talent on nearly every page. . . . Will appeal to fans of Junot Diaz, George Saunders, and readers new to Alexie will find this enriching collection to be the perfect introduction to a formidable literary voice. . . . [Alexie] illuminates the lives of his characters in unique, surprising, and, ultimately, hopeful ways."--Boston Globe"Told in [Alexie's] irreverent, unforgettable voice . . . You'll feel you've been transported inside the soul of a deeply wounded people. But they are a people too comfortable in their brown skins to allow those wounds to break them. . . . With irony and sardonic wit, the Native men and women in Alexie's imagination find a way forward, and they endure. . . . [A] great triumph."--Los Angeles TimesSherman Alexie's stature as a writer of stories, poetry, and novels has soared over the course of his twenty-book, twenty-year career. His wide-ranging, acclaimed fiction throughout the last two decades--from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven to his most recent PEN/Faulkner Award-winning War Dances--have established him as a star in contemporary American literature. A bold and irreverent observer of life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, the daring, versatile, funny, and outrageous Alexie showcases his many talents in Blasphemy, where he unites fifteen beloved classics with sixteen new stories in one sweeping anthology for devoted fans and first-time readers. Included here are some of his most esteemed tales, including "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," in which a homeless Indian man quests to win back a family heirloom; "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," a road-trip morality tale; "The Toughest Indian in the World," about a night shared between a writer and a hitchhiker; and his most recent, "War Dances," about a man grappling with sudden hearing loss in the wake of his father's death. Alexie's new stories are fresh and quintessential, about donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, a twenty-four-hour Asian manicure salon, good and bad marriages, and all species of warriors in America today. An indispensable Alexie collection, Blasphemy reminds us, on every thrilling page, why Alexie is one of our greatest contemporary writers and a true master of the short story.
"Alexie's prose startles and dazzles with unexpected, impossible-to-anticipate moves. These are cultural love stories, and we laugh on every page with a fist tight around our hearts."--The Boston Globe"Poetic and unremittingly honest . . . The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is for the American Indian what Richard Wright's Native Son was for the black American in 1940."--Chicago TribuneSherman Alexie's celebrated first collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, established its author as one of America's most important and provocative voices. The basis for the award-winning movie Smoke Signals, it remains one of his best loved and widely praised books twenty years after its initial publication. Vividly weaving memory, fantasy, and stark reality to paint a portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian reservation, this book introduces some of Alexie's most beloved characters, including Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the storyteller who no one seems to listen to, and his compatriot, Victor, the sports hero who turned into a recovering alcoholic. Now with an updated introduction from Alexie, these twenty-four tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet they are filled with passion and affection, myth and charm. Against a backdrop of addiction, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between men and women, Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, and, most poetically, modern Indians and the traditions of the past.
Reflecting the experience of Native Americans caught in the midst of personal and cultural turmoil, a new collection of short fiction by the award-winning author of Reservation Blues includes such works as "The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above," "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," and "Do You Know Where I Am?" Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 75,000 first printing. 75,000 ad/promo.
Sherman Alexie has been hailed as "one of the best writers we have" (The Nation). Reservation Blues is his "irresistibly stunning debut novel" (San Francisco Chronicle). One day legendary bluesman Robert Johnson appears on the Spokane Indian reservation, in flight from the devil and presumed long dead. When he passes his enchanted instrument to Thomas-Builds-the-Fire--storyteller, misfit, and musician--a magical odyssey begins that will take them from reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan. This is a fresh, luxuriantly comic tale of power, tragedy, and redemption among contemporary Native Americans.
"Part thriller, part magical realism, and part social commentary, Indian Killer . . . lingers long past the final page."--Seattle WeeklyA national best seller, Indian Killer is arguably Sherman Alexie's most controversial book to date--a gritty, racially charged literary thriller that, over a decade after its first publication, remains an electrifying tale of alienation and justice. A serial murderer called the Indian Killer is terrorizing Seattle, hunting, scalping, and slaughtering white men. Motivated by rage and seeking retribution for his people's violent history, his grizzly MO and skillful elusiveness both paralyze the city with fear and prompt an uprising of racial brutality. Out of the chaos emerges John Smith. Born to Indians but raised by white parents, Smith yearns for his lost heritage. As his embitterment with his dual life increases, Smith falls deeper into vengeful madness and quickly surfaces as the prime suspect. Tensions mount, and while Smith battles to allay the anger that engulfs him, the Indian Killer claims another life. With acerbic wit and chilling page-turning intensity, Alexie takes an unflinching look at what nurtures rage within a race both colonized and marginalized by a society that neither values nor understands it.
In his first new fiction since winning the National Book Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, best-selling author Sherman Alexie delivers a virtuoso collection of tender, witty, and soulful stories that expertly capture modern relationships from the most diverse angles. War Dances brims with Alexie's poetic and revolutionary prose, and reminds us once again why he ranks as one of our country's finest writers. With bright insight into the minds of artists, entrepreneurs, fathers, husbands, and sons, Alexie populates his stories with average men on the brink of exceptional change: In the title story, a son recalls his father's "natural Indian death" from alcohol and diabetes, just as he learns that he himself may have a brain tumor; "The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless," dissects a vintage clothing store owner's failing marriage and courtship of a Puma-clad stranger in airports across the country; and "Breaking and Entering" recounts a film editor's fateful confrontation with an thieving adolescent. Brazen and wise War Dances takes us to the heart of what it means to be human. The new beginnings, successes, mistakes, and regrets that make up our daily lives are laid bare in this wide-ranging new work that is quintessential
On the verge of commiting an act of violence, a troubled, orphaned Indian teenager finds himself hurtled through time an into the bodies of a civil rights era FBI agent, an Indian child during the battle at Little Big Horn, a nineteenth- century Indian tracker, and a modern-day airline pilot, before returning to himself, forever altered by his experiences. Original. 100,000 first printing.
An all-new edition of the tragicomic smash hit which stormed the New York Times bestseller charts, now featuring an introduction from Markus Zusak. In his first book for young adults, Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist who leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white high school. This heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written tale, featuring poignant drawings that reflect the character's art, is based on the author's own experiences. It chronicles contemporary adolescence as seen through the eyes of one Native American boy. 'Excellent in every way' Neil Gaiman Illustrated in a contemporary cartoon style by Ellen Forney.
Flight follows this troubled foster teenager - a boy who is not a 'legal' Indian because he was never claimed by his father - as he learns that violence is not the answer.The journey for Flight's young hero begins as he's about to commit a massive act of violence. At the moment of the decision, he finds himself shot back through time to resurface in the body of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, where he sees why 'Hell is Red River, Idaho, in the 1970s'. Red River is only the first stop in an eye-opening trip through moments in American history. He will continue travelling back to inhabit the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Bighorn and then ride with an Indian tracker in the nineteenth century before materialising as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. During these travels through time, his refrain grows: 'Who's to judge?'This novel seeks nothing less than an understanding of why human beings hate. Flight is irrepressible and fearless - Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant.
Drama. Native American Studies. One of the most vital of the younger writers. Watch this guy. He's making myth--Joy Harjo. Displays a mastery of language, a breadth of vision, and an astonishing range of voice and emotion--Studies in American Indian Literature. The high spirit of Crazy Horse is alive in this book and dances powerfully--American Book Review. THE BUSINESS OF FANCYDANCING is writer/director Sherman Alexie's first film since his 1998 smash success Smoke Signals, which he wrote. A ceremony of poetry, song, dance, humor, grief and memory, THE BUSINESS OF FANCYDANCING is the story of one man's art and life, and the messy collision between the two.
Poetry. Fiction. Native American Studies. In this first full collection in nine years, Alexie's poems and prose show his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions. Novelist, storyteller and performer, he won the National Book Award for his YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. His work has been praised throughout the world, but the bedrock remains what The New York Times Book Review said of his very first book: Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time.
