9780802141170
Ten Little Indians share button
Sherman Alexie
Format Paperback
Dimensions 5.52 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.69 (d)
Pages 243
Publisher Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication Date April 2004
ISBN 9780802141170
Book ISBN 10 080214117X
About Book

Sherman Alexie is one of our most acclaimed and popular writers today. With Ten Little Indians, he offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heartrending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love. In Alexie's first story, "The Search Engine," Corliss is a rugged and resourceful student who finds in books the magic she was denied while growing up poor. 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. "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" starts off with a homeless man recognizing in a pawnshop window the fancy-dance regalia that were stolen fifty years earlier from his late grandmother. Even as they often make us laugh, Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candor that cut to the heart of the human experience, shedding brilliant light on what happens when we grow into and out of each other.

Reviews

The Washington Post

My favorite kind of fiction is the kind that manages to be simultaneously smart, funny and sad. In Ten Little Indians, Sherman Alexie has produced nine stories of just this sort. Each has moments of wisdom. Each has moments of hilarity. Each carries us through moments of sadness. — Karen Joy Fowler

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. (June) Forecast: Few short-story collections have the potential to sell like this one. Alexie's ever-growing readership, plus strong backing from Grove-including a 125,000 first printing, $100,000 promo budget and an 18-city author tour-is likely to land this stellar volume on many bestseller lists. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Alexie's stories focus primarily on Indians (rarely "Native Americans") living in this country today, but in no way does that make his fiction totemic. Instead, Alexie's compassion for his characters, directness in storytelling, and wry and cautiously optimistic worldview transcend any label-in many ways, the 11 stories in this collection are everyone's stories. Alexie skillfully glances back at the provincial Indian life already explored in his previous work-in "The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above," for instance, whose Spokane narrator reflects on growing up with a nonconformist mother. But his strength lies in the exploration of contemporary issues, as in "Lawyer's League," in which an ambitious political intern imagines the damage to his career when a pickup basketball game turns into a fist fight, or "Can I Get a Witness?" in which the aftermath of a restaurant bombing results in some joint soul searching by two strangers who have a brief but revelatory encounter. The stories sometimes feel loose and ragged, but Alexie has the ability (and heart) to make even a brief, patchy sketch of a few choice moments resonate and move the reader. Recommended.-Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Nine extraordinary short stories set in and around the Seattle area, featuring Spokane Indians from all walks of urban life. In "The Search Engine," a student of English poetry stumbles upon a book of poems by another member of her tribe and goes on a vision quest to find him. But no brief description does justice to the rich complexity of this story or the others; adjectives such as incisive, ironic, emotional, political, tragic, triumphant, angry, loving, exuberant, and wise come to mind, and Alexie puts everything together in a deceptively casual, often dazzling way. In bursts of exposition, using colloquial language and uncensored thoughts, he creates characters so richly layered and situations so colorfully detailed that readers finish each tale with a feeling of having encountered a real person or event. They include a woman caught in a terrorist attack; a homeless, alcoholic man on a quest to recapture his grandmother's lost regalia; a lawyer who pays too high a cost for being too focused on his ambition; and a feminist mother, as remembered by her adult son. Woven throughout are themes that satirize Native American images, such as the great storyteller and the spiritual master; yet even as the characters are self-deprecating about these stereotypes, Alexie slyly, in unexpected ways, ultimately demonstrates their truth. Those familiar with this author's earlier work will find his charm, originality, and sheer humanity in full measure here.-Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Alienation, second-class citizenship, and revivifying pride in family and heritage-these are the recurring themes in the popular author's third collection (The Toughest Indian in the World, 2000, etc.). Several of the characters in these nine stories are "Native American gentry": upwardly mobile western US Indians (most of them members of the Spokane tribe of Washington State) who've moved uneasily into the white world-like the half-black, half-Spokane bureaucrat who finds the old prejudices awaiting him in a "Lawyer's League" basketball game; or the middle-class Seattle salesman whose sense of security and accomplishment is disturbed by a conversation with an Ethiopian immigrant cabdriver. Alexie's penchant for oddball premises and bizarre narrative twists can misfire, as in a rambling tale about a woman paralegal who survives a terrorist suicide bombing and the planned seduction of her Indian rescuer ("Can I Get a Witness ?"); or lapse into comic monologue, as in an adult son's mixed memories of growing up with his energetic social-activist single mom ("The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above"). But the volume contains three marvelous tales: "The Search Engine," about an intellectually voracious Spokane college girl's pursuit of a long-inactive Native American poet, casts a bleakly illuminating spotlight on the complexities and disillusionments of the examined life; "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" is an irresistible picaresque in which a homeless Spokane, discovering his late grandmother's fancy-dancing costume (her "powwow regalia") in a pawnshop window, undertakes a mock-epic "quest" to reclaim the outfit ("I want to be a hero, . . . I want to win it back like a knight"). Even betteris "What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church ?," about a middle-aged former basketball star who honors the memories of his dead parents by rededicating himself to the game of his youth. Comedy, pathos, heartfelt characterizations, and agendas transformed into thoughtful narratives: Alexie's strongest book in years. First printing of 125,000; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour