The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

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.

"Spare, disturbing stories...with stark, lyric power."
-- "New York Times Book Review"

"A compelling and impressive collection."
-- "Washington Times"

"Alexie blends an almost despairing social realism with jolting flashes of visionary fantasy and a quirky sense of gallows humor."
-- "The Bloomsbury Review"

"Stunning and compelling. Alexie is a visionary and by far thebest writer I've seen published in recent years."
-- "Talk of the Town, " Washington