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Composed of twenty-two interconnected stories with recurring characters, the work is often described by critics as a short-story collection, though some argue that it has novel-like features similar to Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. The collection was originally released in it was reissued in, with two new stories, by Grove Atlantic Press. Junior and Victor send Thomas away when he compares their drug use to a Spokane coming-of-age ritual. In the first, Victor steals a horse in the second, Thomas sends all white people back to Europe using a magic dance and in the third, Junior is a successful singing cowboy in an alternate United States governed by Native Americans.
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Each young man describes his drug-induced hallucinations, all of which involve alternate versions of Native American history. Victor and Junior Polatkin sneak away from a party to take psychedelic mushrooms, and reluctantly bring Thomas Builds-the-Fire along. In this story, Victor and his friends are young adults. A hurricane touches down on the reservation but causes little damage, and life goes on. The guests are drunk and rowdy, and his uncles Adolph and Arnold fistfight in the yard. Alexie, who claims the title came to him from a dream, studs his stories with other references to popular culture to underscore the ways in which representations of Native Americans have played a part in. The names are taken from a popular radio and television show of the s in which a white man, the Lone Ranger, teams up with an Indian, Tonto, to battle evil in the old west. The book's title is derived from one of the collection's stories, which details the experience of a Native American who leaves the reservation to live in Seattle with his white girlfriend and then moves back. Alexie fuses surreal imagery, flashbacks, dream sequences, diary entries, and extended poetic passages with his storytelling to create tales that resemble prose poems more than conventional narratives. The book's central characters, Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, are two young Native-American men living on the Spokane Indian Reservation, and the stories describe their relationships, desires, and histories with family members and others who live on the reservation. 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 most poetically, between modern Indians and the traditions of the past.Ĭomprised of twenty-two interconnected stories with recurring characters, the work is often described by critics as a short-story collection, though some argue that it has novel-like features similar to Louis Erdich's Love Medicine. 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 James Many Horses III, even though he actually writes them on his kitchen table. 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. These 22 interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream.
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In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur dAlene Indian, brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spoke Indian Reservation. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie