The Lone Ranger and Tanto Fist Fight in Heaven - Softcover

Alexie, Sherman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060976241 ISBN 13: 9780060976248

Publisher: HarperPerennial, 1998

Synopsis

In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-two interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents hoping that the alcohol seeping through their skins might help him sleep, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who tells his stories long after people stop listening, and Jimmy Many Horses, dying of cancer, who writes letters on stationary that reads "From the Death Bed of Jimmy Many Horses III," even though he actually writes then on his kitchen table. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and mostly poetically between modern Indians and the traditions of the past.

About this title

Review

"Again and again, Alexie's prose startles and dazzles with unexpected, impossible-to-anticipate moves. These are cultural love stories, and we laugh on every page with fist tight around our hearts. With this stunning collection, Sherman Alexie has become quite clearly an important new voice in American literature."

About the Author

Alexie is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter. He has won the Pen/Faulkner Award, Stranger Genius Award in Literature, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Excellence in Children's Literature, and the Malamud Award.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperPerennial
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060976241
• ISBN 13: 9780060976248
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240