Ceremony: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition

50 Books for 50 years

Powell's anniversary list: 1971-2021

Native American Heritage Month

A selection of pivotal works by Indigenous authors.

A profound portrait of PTSD and cultural marginalization, on and off the Laguna Pueblo reservation, Silko’s classic novel remains cutting-edge 44 years after its original publication. Weaving between past and present, Native folklore and stark depictions of reservation life, Silko uses formal innovation and lyricism to convey how trauma, depression, and colonization coalesce to break the spirit, and the potential of Native storytelling and ceremony to heal it. Recommended By Rhianna W., Powells.com

The great Native American Novel of a battered veteran returning home to heal his mind and spirit.

More than thirty-five years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power. The Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition contains a new preface by the author and an introduction by Larry McMurtry.

"Without question Leslie Marmon Silko is the most accomplished Native American writer of her generation." The New York Times Book Review

"The novel is very deliberately a ceremony in itself — demanding but confident and beautifully written." The Boston Globe

"An exceptional novel — a cause for celebration." The Washington Post Book World

"Her assurance, her gravity, her flexibility are all wonderful gifts." The New York Review of Books

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She has said that her writing has at its core "the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or mixed-blood person." As she grew up on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, she learned the stories and culture of the Laguna people from her great-grandmother and other female relatives. After receiving her B. A. in English at the University of New Mexico, she enrolled in the University of New Mexico law school but completed only three semesters before deciding that writing and storytelling, not law, were the means by which she could best promote justice. She married John Silko in 1970. Prior to the writing of Ceremony, she published a series of short stories, including "The Man to Send Rain Clouds." She also authored a volume of poetry, Laguna Woman: Poems, for which she received the Pushcart Prize for Poetry.

In 1973, Silko moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she wrote Ceremony. Initially conceived as a comic story abut a mother's attempts to keep her son, a war veteran, away from alcohol, Ceremony gradually transformed into an intricate meditation on mental disturbance, despair, and the power of stories and traditional culture as the keys to self-awareness and, eventually, emotional healing. Having battled depression herself while composing her novel, Silko was later to call her book "a ceremony for staying sane." Silko has followed the critical success of Ceremony with a series of other novels, including Storyteller, Almanac for the Dead, and Gardens in the Dunes. Nevertheless, it was the singular achievement of Ceremony that first secured her a place among the first rank of Native American novelists. Leslie Marmon Silko now lives on a ranch near Tucson, Arizona.