"Alexie's prose startles and dazzles with unexpected,
impossible-to-anticipate moves. These are cultural love stories, and we
laugh on every page with a fist tight around our hearts."--The Boston
Globe
"Poetic and unremittingly honest . . . The Lone Ranger and Tonto
Fistfight in Heaven is for the American Indian what Richard Wright's
Native Son was for the black American in 1940."--Chicago Tribune
Sherman Alexie's celebrated first collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto
Fistfight in Heaven, established its author as one of America's most
important and provocative voices. The basis for the award-winning movie
Smoke Signals, it remains one of his best loved and widely praised
books twenty years after its initial publication.
Vividly weaving memory, fantasy, and stark reality to paint a portrait
of life in and around the Spokane Indian reservation, this book
introduces some of Alexie's most beloved characters, including Thomas
Builds-the-Fire, the storyteller who no one seems to listen to, and his
compatriot, Victor, the sports hero who turned into a recovering
alcoholic. Now with an updated introduction from Alexie, these
twenty-four tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and
government-issue cheese, and yet they are filled with passion and
affection, myth and charm. Against a backdrop of addiction, car
accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances
between men and women, Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban
Indians, and, most poetically, modern Indians and the traditions of the
past.
