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1 Local Warehouse Native North American- Literature

The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping

by Nasdijj

The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping Cover

ISBN13: 9780345453891
ISBN10: 0345453891
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: Standard
All Product Details

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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Nasdijj?s critically acclaimed, award-winning memoir, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, took the literary world by storm. "An authentic, important book," raved Esquire. "Unfailingly honest and very nearly perfect." Now, this celebrated Native American writer has given readers a powerful, brave, and deeply moving memoir of the unconditional love between a father and a son.

Eleven-year-old Awee came to live with Nasdijj carrying a brown paper bag containing all his belongings, a legacy of abuse, and AIDS. But this beautiful, loving, and intelligent little boy also had enormous hope for his new life. The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping is the heart-rending but also joyous story of this untraditional little family, filled with love and laughter, but also with great pain, as Awee became progressively more ill.

Nasdijj writes about their motorcycle trip to see the ocean for the first time, about baths and baseball, about Awee?s "big brother" Crow Dog, and his dog, Navajo, but also about the brutal realities of reservation life and the challenges of dealing with a sometimes hostile medical establishment that often lacks the knowledge to treat pediatric AIDS. In the end, Nasdijj must find his own way of alleviating Awee?s suffering — and of helping him maintain his dignity in the face of a disease that gradually robs him of himself.

By turns searing and searching, lyrical and raw, The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping is ultimately transcendent — for in the end Awee got what he wanted most in his short life: a real dad.

Review:

"This is a powerful and rare display of visceral, emotional writing." Publishers Weekly

Review:

"This contribution to the already broad shelf of AIDS memoirs is an exceptionally moving redemption tale....Hyperbolic, wildly excessive, incandescent scream-of-consciousness eulogy for a child racked by horrors he can't understand." Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Nasdijj was born in the American Southwest in 1950. His grew up partly on the reservation — his mother was Navajo — and partly in migrant camps around the country. He has been writing for more than decades, making ends meet by reporting for small-town papers, teaching, and migrant labor. He is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and winner of the Salon Book Award. "Nasdijj" is Athabaskan for "to become again." He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
victoria19283, December 13, 2009 (view all comments by victoria19283)
This book is really disgusting. The narrator seems to be a pedafile. I am sorry I wasted my money on this book and that my money went to support someone who produces this sort of trash.

It really outrages me that the only problem that people have with this book is that the author is a fake and not that this book is drenched in incestuous / pedafilic undertones.

Here are some quotes directly from the book:

This is the father talking about his son, Awee:

"Awee could be seductive. It scared me deep down into my bones where I hurt with him and me and all the things we could never be. Father and son would have to be enough. Even sith AIDS, Awee stood poised on the cusp of adolescence, and in his anxiety, he wanted everything. His vulnerability was awesome. I have seen him more than naked."

The son Awee tells his father

"I want to ride the bike naked with you at night."
The father then describes, "the dark hard against our balls. His arms around my belly. Holds fathers to their sons like fans."

The father says of his son
"I wish he would kiss me..."

The father describes his sons underwear: "I picked them up. His underpants. They do feel soft against my face..."

Father and son "Together. Shaving at the sink. Nude."

"All I could do to calm Awee is to hold him tight, let him melt into me, surround him with something of the softness of my darker places.


The father says of his son, "I was in love with him."


The father describes his feelings for his son:
"Monster that I am I will kiss upon the beauty of your bones. And sleep fitfully in sadness like a lover lost in moans."

The father describes his son:
" I wish he would sleep. He is so dangerous. In his underpants. He asks me to hold him. His dad never held him. Had never had the strength. For just awhile. Okay. I hold him. He sort of wilts. The ice picks will come soon enough. 'Is it sex?' he asks. He means my holding him. ' Yeah, it's sex,' I say. A lie. But a nice one."

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mary scriver, March 5, 2009 (view all comments by mary scriver)
This is the second in the three-book set written by Timothy Patrick Barrus under the pseudonym "Nasdijj." He was a well-known writer, editor and publisher in the Seventies pre-AIDS San Francisco gay community. His interest was in the "leatherman" movement, based on the idea that being gay needn't mean being effete or powerless. Motorcycle leathers were their marker.

This book is true, but disguised to protect the boy and others. It is a distillation of Barrus' real life-work which has been dedicated to boys at risk and on the outer edge of society. Hailed as brilliant in the beginning, as soon as Nasdijj's real identity was discovered, the very same writing was condemned as a hoax. He no longer lives in the US.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780345453891
Editor:
Dyssegaard, Elisabeth Kallick
Author:
Nasdijj
Publisher:
Random House
Location:
New York
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Navajo Indians
Subject:
Ethnic Cultures - Native Americans
Subject:
Aids (disease) in children
Subject:
Aids
Subject:
Personal Memoirs
Edition Number:
1st ed.
Series Volume:
107-419
Publication Date:
February 2003
Binding:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Pages:
336
Dimensions:
9.34x5.82x1.11 in. 1.10 lbs.

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