Ten Little Indians (U)

Sherman Alexie is one of our most acclaimed and popular writers today. With Ten Little Indians, he offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heartrending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love. In Alexie's first story, The Search Engine, Corliss is a rugged and resourceful student who finds in books the magic she was denied while growing up poor. In The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above, an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her to the bewilderment of her only child. What You Pawn I Will Redeem starts off with a homeless man recognizing in a pawnshop window the fancy-dance regalia that were stolen fifty years earlier from his late grandmother. Even as they often make us laugh, Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candor that cut to the heart of the human experience, shedding brilliant light on what happens when we grow into and out of each other.The Washington PostMy favorite kind of fiction is the kind that manages to be simultaneously smart, funny and sad. In Ten Little Indians, Sherman Alexie has produced nine stories of just this sort. Each has moments of wisdom. Each has moments of hilarity. Each carries us through moments of sadness. Karen Joy Fowler