The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, skillfully blends memory, imagination, and harsh reality to create a nuanced, cruelly sarcastic picture of life in and around the Spoke Indian Reservation in this collection of darkly humorous short stories. These twenty-two interconnected stories are full of myth and dream, love and devotion, and are told by individuals who were reared on humiliation and government-issue cheese. Nine-year-old Victor crawled between his comatose parents in the hopes that the alcohol soaking through their skins would help him fall asleep. Jimmy Many Horses, a cancer patient, writes letters on stationery that says "From the Death Bed of James Many Horses III," even though he really writes them on his home table. Thomas Builds-the-Fire, a storyteller who continues to tell tales long after others have stopped listening. Alexie portrays the gaps between men and women, reservation Indians and urban Indians, and most poetically, between contemporary Indians and the customs of the past, against a background of drinking, driving accidents, laughing, and basketball.