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The
Toughest Indian in the World Paperback
published by Grove Press |
Awards
2000 National Magazine Award nomination for "The Toughest Indian in the World"
2000 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize Finalist
2001 PEN USA West Fiction Award Finalist
2001 PEN/Malamud Award
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Summary
In these stories, we meet the kind of American Indians we rarely see in literature -- the kind who pay their bills, hold down jobs, fall in and out of love. A Spokane Indian journalist transplanted from the reservation to the city picks up a hitchhiker, a Lummi boxer looking to take on the toughest Indian in the world. A diabetic Spokane child waits for his father to return from the hospital; the kid has "nearly normal blood sugar, a bag full of hypodermic needles, and half of his left foot." An estranged interracial couple, separated in the midst of a traffic accident, rediscover their love for each other. A white drifter holds up an International House of Pancakes, demanding a dollar per customer and someone to love, and emerges with $42 and an overweight Indian he dubs Salmon Boy. Sherman Alexie's voice conveys remarkable passion, and these stories are love stories -- between parents and children, white people and Indians, movie stars and ordinary people. Witty, tender, and fierce, The Toughest Indian in the World is a virtuoso performance by one of the country's finest writers.
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Table of Contents
Assimilation
The Toughest Indian in the World
Class
South by Southwest
The Sin Eaters
Indian Country
Saint Junior
Dear John Wayne
One Good Man
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Excerpt from "The Sin Eaters"
I dreamed about war on the night before the war began, and though nobody officially called it a war until years later, I woke that morning with the sure knowledge that the war, or whatever they wanted to call it, was about to begin and that I would be a soldier in a small shirt.
On that morning, the sun rose and bloomed like blood in a glass syringe. The entire Spokane Indian Reservation and all of its people and places were clean and scrubbed. The Spokane River rose up from its bed like a man who had been healed and joyously wept all the way down to its confluence with the Columbia River. There was water everywhere: a thousand streams interrupted by makeshift waterfalls; small ponds hidden beneath a mask of thick fronds and anonymous blossoms; blankets of dew draped over the shoulders of isolated knolls. An entire civilization of insects lived in the mud puddle formed by one truck tire and a recent rainstorm. The blades of grass, the narrow pine needles, and the stalks of roadside wheat were as sharp and bright as surgical tools.
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Reviews
San Francisco Chronicle: Bold, Sexy Stories From Alexie
Denver Post: Alexie's tribal perspective universal in its appeal
Seattle Weekly: Reservation Cues
Salon.com
Lincoln Journal Star: 'Toughest Indian' a knockout collection of stories
New York Review of Books: Haunted by Salmon
Booklist review
Amazon.com review
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