Sherman Alexie’s latest collection of short stories is now out in paperback and is already reappearing on the Pacific Northwest Independent Bestseller List. War Dances won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner prize for fiction this year. “War Dances taps every vein and nerve, every tissue, every issue that quickens the current blood-pulse: parenthood, divorce, broken links, sex, gender and racial conflict, substance abuse, medical neglect, 9/11, Official Narrative vs What Really Happened, settler religion vs native spirituality; marketing, shopping, and war, war, war,” said PEN/Faulkner judge Al Young, California’s Poet Laureate. “All the heartbreaking ways we don’t live now — this is the caring, eye-opening beauty of [War Dances].”
Alexie has called War Dances a “mixtape” of writing styles and forms—”stories, poems, themes intersecting themes.”
Alexie, 43, previously won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for his autobiographical novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (he also won a Pacific Northwest Independent Book Award for this novel). He recently picked up the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award.