The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven

Author

Sherman Alexie

Call Number

• FICTION ALEX (CEN)

Publication Information

New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, c1993.

Physical Description

x, 223 p. ; 24 cm.

Summary

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.

Contents

• Every little hurricane
• A drug called tradition
• Because my father always said he was the only Indian who saw Jimi Hendrix play "The star-spangled banner" at Woodstock
• Crazy Horse dreams
• The only traffic signal on the reservation doesn't flash red anymore
• Amusements
• This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona
• The fun house
• All I wanted to do was dance
• The trial of Thomas Builds-The-Fire
• Distances
• Jesus Christ's half-brother is alive and well on the Spokane Indian Reservation
• A train is an order of occurrence designed to lead to some result
• A good story
• The first annual all-Indian horseshoe pitch and barbecue
• Imagining the reservation
• The approximate size of my favorite tumor
• Indian education
• The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven
• Family portrait
• Somebody kept saying powwow
• Witnesses, secret and not.