Synopses & Reviews
In the 111-year life of the Spokane Indian reservation, not one person has arrived by accident until the day the black stranger appears with nothing more than the suit he wears and the guitar slung over his back. The man happens to be the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, in flight from the devil and presumed long dead. And when he passes his enchanted instrument to young Thomas-Builds-the-Fire-storyteller, misfit, and musician a magical odyssey begins. From reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan, Thomas and his Coyote Springs bandmates careen through ancestral nightmares and rock-and-roll dreams, sounding chords of celebration and survival as timeless as their tribe.
Review
"His talent is immense and genuine....Sherman Alexie is one of the best writers we have." The Nation
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"Sherman Alexie has become quite clearly an important voice in american literature." Boston Globe
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"Quiet, powerful...Sherman Alexie creates stinging commentary, and he shows his determination to make you uncertain whether you want to laugh or cry....He is funny, he is perceptive, and he knows how to stir us in large and small ways. talent is real, and it is very large, and I will gratefully read whatever he writes, in whatever form." New York Times Book Review
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"High-flying, humor spiked...poignant and poetic....explores the place where dreams and down-and-dirty reality collide." People
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"Sherman Alexie is wildly talented." USA Today
About the Author
Sherman Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian. He earned a 1994 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, was a citation winner for the PEN/Hemingway Award for the Best First Book of Fiction, and was recently named one of Granta's Best of the Young American Novelists. Alexie is the author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which served as the basis for a film that premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. His book Reservation Blues won him the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award. Alexie's several books of poetry include I Would Steal Horses, Old Shirts & New Skins, First Indian on the Moon, and The Summer of Black Widows.