The Toughest Indian in the World

by Sherman Alexie

Overview

“Stunning” short stories by the National Book Award–winning author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
 In this bestselling volume of stories, National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie challenges readers to see Native American Indians as the complex, modern, real people they are. The tender and tenacious tales of The Toughest Indian in the World introduce us to the one-hundred-eighteen-year-old Etta Joseph, former co-star and lover of John Wayne, and to the unnamed narrator of the title story, a young Indian journalist searching for togetherness one hitchhiker at a time.
Countless other brilliant creations leap from Alexie’s mind in these nine stories. Upwardly mobile Indians yearn for a more authentic life, married Indian couples push apart while still cleaving together, and ordinary, everyday Indians hunt for meaning in their lives. The Toughest Indian in the World combines anger, humor, and beauty into radiant fictions, fiercely imagined, from one of America’s greatest writers.
 This ebook features an illustrated biography including rare photos from the author’s personal collection. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781480457188
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	10/15/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	238
Sales rank:	201,926
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Sherman Alexie is the author of, most recently, Blasphemy, stories, from Grove Press, and Face, poetry, from Hanging Loose Press. He is the winner of the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award, the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the 2001 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and a Special Citation for the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction. Smoke Signals, the film he wrote and coproduced, won both the Audience Award and the Filmmakers Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Alexie lives with his family in Seattle.

Read an 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 next 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.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• 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
• A Biography of Sherman Alexie

What People are Saying About This

Dinitia Smith

"Hard-edged and urban, distinctly individual . . . The characters in Mr. Alexie's work are not the usual kind of Indians. . . . They are not tragic victims or noble savage. . . . They listen to Jimi Hendrix and Hank Williams; they dream of being basketball stars . . . . And unlike most Indians in fiction, they are sometimes funny."

Bruce Barcott

"The world's first fast-talking, wisecracking, mediagenic American Indian superstar . . . His characters carry the uneasy burden of racism with a resigned form of black humor."

Jan Warner-Poole

I love Alexie's writing. These stories will make the reader cry, smile, or be terrified. A beautiful collection of love stories; the prose is biting, ironic, tender, but never dull or plain. Sometimes disturbing, it is a joy to read.
—Jan Warner-Poole, Wayside Books, Battle Ground, WA

Leslie Marmon Silko

"Make no mistake: Alexie's talent is immense and genuine. . . . On this big Indian reservation we call 'the United States,' Sherman Alexie is one of the best writers we have."

Editorial Reviews

This "compulsively readable" short-story collection by best-selling author Alexie introduces the kind of American Indians who pay their bills, hold down jobs, and fall in and out of love. "Lyrical, moving, and thought-provoking - Alexie explores stereotypes and shows us Native Americans with humor, sobriety, and dignity." "Creative and offbeat, definitely worth reading." "After this, I'm starting my own Sherman Alexie book collection."

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

A prolific novelist, poet and screenplay writer, Alexie (Indian Killer; Reservation Blues) has been hailed as one of the best young writers of his generation. This dexterous second collection of stories contains what may be one of the best short fiction pieces of the year. "The Toughest Indian in the World" follows a young Spokane Indian who works at an all-white newspaper in Seattle and, in a forlorn attempt to reconnect with his roots, has his first homosexual experience with a tough Lummi fighter. It's a moving story that skillfully employs symbolism and flashbacks to construct an ending that is both uplifting and sorrowful. Many of the eight other stories in this collection also deal with urban Indians who are straddling two worlds: an intimate but indigent life on the reservation and an affluent but strange and sometimes hostile white middle-class existence. Their solutions to this double bind are rarely ordinary. "Assimilation" tells of a Coeur d'Alene woman who deliberately cheats on her white husband, only to rediscover her affection for him in the middle of a traffic jam. "Class" features a Spokane who sometimes tells white women he's Aztec, because "there were aphrodisiacal benefits from claiming to be descended from ritual cannibals." In "South by Southwest" a white man and a fat Indian nicknamed Salmon Boy, who declares he's not homosexual but does believe in love, set off on a nonviolent killing spree. Two tales, "Saint Junior" and "A Good Man," deal with marriage and death on the rez. The anger in these narratives is leavened by Alexie's acerbic wit and his obvious belief in the redemptive power of love. One exception, however, is "The Sin Eaters," an apocalyptic tale in which America's Indians are rounded up into massive underground prisons where soldiers force them to breed and give up their blood. Humorous, disturbing, formally inventive and heartwarming, Alexie's stories continually surprise, revealing him once again as a master of his craft. Agent, Nancy Cahoon, N. Stauffer Assoc. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Alexie may not be the toughest Indian in the world (in this stunning new collection, that honor goes to a Lummi fighter picked up by the narrator--or perhaps it's the durable narrator himself), but he definitely writes some of the toughest prose around. This work, Alexie's first collection since The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, offers nine stories rendered in muscular, unencumbered language that can deliver a shock like a good, hard punch. No, we shouldn't be much surprised when a character announces, "Indians just like to believe that white people will vanish, perhaps explode into smoke, if they are ignored enough times," but the delivery is so cool we are caught off guard. As the stories proceed from an Indian wife reconnecting with her husband after a calculated tryst to a lesbian couple (one Indian, one white) whose lives are complicated by a down-and-out male friend to an Indian father happy (is he really?) that his son has a good life with a white stepfather, Alexie moves in for the kill, consistently surprising us with stories that are neither sentimental nor angry but far more emotionally complex. Highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

A mixed-bag collection of nine stories from the popular American (Spokane Coeur d'Alene) Indian author of such breakthrough successes as The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and Reservation Blues (1995). Alexie has been known to scorn the politically correct contemporary appellation "Native American," and this volume rather overindulges what appears to be its author's sardonic reaction to his own celebrity and perceived exoticism ("Strangely enough," observes the Sherman Alexie-like narrator of the bitterly funny "Class," "there were aphrodisiacal benefits from claiming to be descended from ritual cannibals"). A few of these tales feel like understandably unpublished early work ("South by Southwest," a flagrantly manic farce that laboriously satirizes white liberal guilt, and "Indian Country," about a successful writer's cultural and sexual alienation, are especially suspect). Even at his best, Alexie doesn't construct; he riffs: to splendid effect in "The Sin Eaters," a rich fantasy of ethnic conflict, incest, and genocide laden with vivid literary and biblical allusions and eye-popping metaphors ("They're going to take the tomorrow out of our bones"); "Dear John Wayne," a cultural anthropologist's interview with the aged Indian woman who claims she was the eponymous screen star's lover (during the filming of The Searchers); and "Saint Junior," a mischievous lampooning of affirmative-action programs. Alexie digs still deeper in rock-hard portrayals of a volatile "mixed" married couple ("Assimilation"); a son preparing tobidhis dying father farewell ("One Good Man"); and the surprise-filled title story, about an Indian intellectual who has strayed uncomfortably away from his origins, and is reconnected with them after he picks up a menacing hitchhiker. Alexie knows he's contemporary literature's "Indian du jour" (a phrase he has often used), and isn't quite sure how he feels about it. That ambivalence gives his writing a salutary charge of energy, making him one of our most challenging, interesting, and promising young writers.(First printing of $75,000; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour)

Kirkus Reviews

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