Ten Little Indians
Stories
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist: A “stellar collection” of stories about navigating life off the reservation, filled with laughter and heartbreak (People).
In these lyrical, affectionate tales from the author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, characters navigate the crossroads of culture, battle stereotypes, and find themselves through everything from politics to basketball. Richard, the narrator of “Lawyer’s League,” grows up in Seattle, the son of “an African American giant who played defensive end for the University of Washington Huskies” and “a petite Spokane Indian ballerina.” A woman is caught in a restaurant when a suicide bomb goes off in “Can I Get a Witness.” And Estelle Walks Above (née Estelle Miller), studies her way off the Spokane Indian Reservation and goes on to both enjoy and resent the company of the white women of Seattle—who see her as a shamanic genius, and look to her for guidance on everything from sex and fashion to spirituality.
These and the other “warm, revealing, invitingly roundabout stories” in Ten Little Indians run the gamut from earthy wit to sobering emotional truth, mapping the outer reaches of the human heart (The New York Times Book Review).
From a New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award–winning author, these tales, “rambunctious and exuberant, bristle with an edgy and mordant humor” (Chicago Tribune).
This ebook features an illustrated biography including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fluent, exuberant and supremely confident, this outstanding collection shows Alexie (The Toughest Indian in the World,etc.) at the height of his powers. Humor plays a leading role in the volume's nine stories, but it's love, both romantic and familial, that is the lens through which Alexie examines his compelling characters. His range stretches from the strange to the poignantly antic. In "Can I Get a Witness" an Indian woman is caught inside a restaurant when a suicide bomber blows himself up; in "Do Not Go Gentle" a father buys a vibrator dubbed "Chocolate Thunder" and uses it as a spiritual talisman to successfully bring his seriously injured baby out of a coma. In one of the book's finest stories, "The Search Engine," Corliss Joseph, an intrepid 19-year-old Spokane Indian college student, finds an obscure 1973 volume of Indian poetry and tracks down the author, an aging forklift operator with painful memories of his foray into the literary world. Basketball looms large in a number of these stories, from the thoughtful "Lawyer's League" to the superb final entry, "What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?" Loose, jaunty and salted with long, hilarious, inspired riffs "What kind of life had she created for herself? She was a laboratory mouse lost in the capitalistic maze. She was an underpaid cow paying one-tenth mortgage on a three-bedroom, two-bath abattoir" these are still cohesive, powerful narratives, expanding on Alexie's continuing theme of what it means to be an Indian culturally, politically and personally. This is a slam dunk collection sure to score with readers everywhere.
