Face

Poetry. Fiction. Native American Studies. In this first full collection in nine years, Alexie's poems and prose show his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions. Novelist, storyteller and performer, he won the National Book Award for his YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. His work has been praised throughout the world, but the bedrock remains what The New York Times Book Review said of his very first book: "Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time."

"Brash, confrontational verse and prose have made Alexie the most famous, and the most controversial, Native American writer of his generation. Alexie (First Indian on the Moon), in this first book of poems since 2000, sometimes works in sonnets, rhymed couplets, short quatrains, even villanelles. The results are mixed and occasionally nave ('When I tell my wife about my adolescent rage/ She shrugs, rolls her eyes, and turns the page'). More successful are his many experiments with footnotes and interpolated blocks of prose within poems, devices that let Alexie explore his self-consciousness, as he looks back on his childhood on 'the rez' in Washington State, inward to his sex life and his happy marriage, and outward to public events, from the Clinton impeachment to Gonzaga University basketball. Alexie's self-interruptions also permit flights of comedy, with homages to Richard Pryor and to the porn star Ron Jeremy. The humor, in turn, lets Alexie brace himself for his most serious subjects: his love for his son, the history of his people and the last illness and death of his father, a flawed but durable example of the manliness for which Alexie so often strives. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Mr. Alexie's is one of the major lyric voices of our time." The New York Times Book Review

Sherman Alexie's poems, fiction, essays and films have won him an international following since his first book, The Business of Fancydancing, was published in 1992. Smoke Signals, the film he adapted from one of his short stories and co-produced, enlarged his audience still further. Alexie's awards include the Stranger Genius Award in Literature, the Boston Globe Horn Book Awards for Excellence in Children's Literature in Fiction, the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Regents' Distinguished Alumnus Award from Washington State University, the 2001 PEN/Malamud Award from PEN/Faulkner Foundation, as well as honors and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Foundation, and a citation as "One of 20 Best American Novelists Under the Age of 40" from Granta magazine. An enrolled Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife and sons.