Tony Hillerman is beloved for his novels of intrigue in the American Southwest. In Tony Hillerman’s Navajoland, Laurance Linford takes readers on a journey through the Four Corners region to the haunts of Hillerman’s characters. Offered in encyclopedic form, each entry gives the common name of a particular location, the Navajo name and history, and a description of the location’s significance in various Hillerman novels. An understanding of the Navajo names and their relations to the landscape will lend a new dimension to the characters and events Tony Hillerman created.
"Again and again in Christina Hutchins’s exquisite Tender the Maker, poems startle us into awareness of the overlooked, the nearly always invisible (such as a library’s unused dictionary), and the marvelous, those aspects of life that come under the rubric of ‘mystery,’ in all senses of the word. Hutchins combines a pitch-perfect and precise lyricism with a postmodern sensibility of language’s materiality.”
—Cynthia Hogue, judge for the 2015 May Swenson Poetry Award
"An elegantly crafted, dense work that invites readers to travel on spiritual, philosophical, and historical journeys."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Tender the Maker revisits the age-old comparison between poet and deity, highlighting its blind spots, namely the times when creating also means losing, destroying, forgetting. . . . Each poem becomes a map where time and space intersect and unearth connections that help us confront the weight of history, whether our own or that of others."
—Fjords Review
"[T]hroughout the book, Hutchins guides me into her patient, fragile, complex vision. . . . Both the depth and the precision of Hutchins’s work arise from her exact attention to the 'motion-in-relation' of herself as an artist, which is also attention to the tools of her work and to her imagination’s duty to honor the seen and the not seen."
—Beloit Poetry Journal
The May Swenson Poetry Award is an annual competition named for May Swenson, one of America’s most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in her hometown of Logan, Utah.
For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders’ Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.
Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father’s striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen’s own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self—each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer’s life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, Tiger Writing radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.
"I have almost finished my longbook," Maxine Hong Kingston declares. "Let my life as Poet begin...I won't be a workhorse anymore; I'll be a skylark." To Be the Poet is Kingston's manifesto, the avowal and declaration of a writer who has devoted a good part of her sixty years to writing prose, and who, over the course of this spirited and inspiring book, works out what the rest of her life will be, in poetry. Taking readers along with her, this celebrated writer gathers advice from her gifted contemporaries and from sages, critics, and writers whom she takes as ancestors. She consults her past, her conscience, her time--and puts together a volume at once irreverent and deeply serious, playful and practical, partaking of poetry throughout as it pursues the meaning, the possibility, and the power of the life of the poet.
A manual on inviting poetry, on conjuring the elusive muse, To Be the Poet is also a harvest of poems, from charms recollected out of childhood to bursts of eloquence, wonder, and waggish wit along the way to discovering what it is to be a poet.
Colombian-born Santiago Martinez starts his adult life as a young gay writer living in Spain. Years later, as a university professor in New York City, Santiago is called back to his native Colombia upon the suicide of his sister. There he learns some shocking secrets about his childhood and adolescence and comes to the realization that cherished memories of the past are only illusion.
Treacherously comic and poignant, the autobiographical stories in They Change the Subject follow a young man’s quest for identity through love and desire. Sustained by a single voice, the stories simultaneously offer a fractured novel and stand, powerfully, on their own. At the center of each tale is the heightened, visceral possibility of unexpected emotional encounters—from an escort’s dates in Manhattan hotels to a photo shoot that doubles as seduction. Always pushing toward a bigger shiver of passion, Martin’s young-man-on-the-make learns how to adapt his persona to suit his lovers’ needs and tries to embrace his own experience—and his self—by becoming the purest object of desire.
Praise for David Mason
“. . . richly evocative and rare . . .”
—Publishers Weekly
“David Mason has succeeded in restoring to poetry some of the territory lost over recent centuries to prose fiction.”
—Paul Lake, First Things
In this new collection of essays, award-winning poet David Mason further broadens his exploration of Western and frontier themes. Beginning with the subject of poetry in and about the American West, he then widens his canvas to examine poets as diverse as James Wright, Anthony Hecht, and B. H. Fairchild, as well as taking up the idea of “the West” in global terms.
The title essay builds on a product of Mason’s upbringing in the American West—his “two minds” about the life of poetry, one aware that he needs and loves the art, and one equally aware that he understands a world outside cultural definitions. These two minds coexist throughout each lively, evocative essay, while Mason delves into family history and his efforts to connect himself to place, narrative poets of the American West, and farther-flung topics such as literary movements, post-colonial studies, and favorite Greek writers. In each of these meditations, Mason pursues a personal voice, connecting what he reads to a life outside books and making poetry accessible to the common reader.
In her second book of poetry, Jo McDougall takes her readers to the dusty prairie towns of the central states, places where the flat terrain belies a complex human landscape. In short, dceptively simple lines, McDougall can so keenly trace the lineaments of place and era that her subject stands before us, its essence displayed and made timeless.
Quietly, with an almost aphoristic bit, McDougall writes about ordinary lives and small towns in a way that her readers may never forget.
Troublemakers is an often hilarious, sometimes frightening, occasionally off-the-wall collection of stories about men living on the edge. From the streets of Chicago's southwest side to the rural roads of Nebraska to the small towns of southern Illinois, these men tread a very fine line between right and wrong, love and hate, humor and horror.
Each story is a Pandora's box waiting to be opened: a high school boy with a new driver's license picks his brother up from jail; a UPS driver suspects his wife of having an affair but cannot find any tangible evidence of her indiscretion; an unemployed man's life begins to unravel after he discovers a dead man in a tree in his own backyard; two boys spend Halloween with an older thug; a young college teacher's patience is tested by both his annoying colleagues and the criminals who haunt his neighborhood. In story after story, McNally's troublemakers lead readers to a place no less thrilling or dangerous than the human heart itself.
2020 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award finalist
Darrick MacBrehon, a government auditor, wakes among the dead. Bloodied and disoriented from a gaping head wound, the man who staggers out of the mine crack in Redbird, West Virginia, is much more powerful—and dangerous—than the one thrown in. An orphan with an unknown past, he must now figure out how to have a future.
Hard-as-nails Lourana Taylor works as a sweepstakes operator and spends her time searching for any clues that might lead to Dreama, her missing daughter. Could this stranger’s tale of a pit of bones be connected? With help from disgraced deputy Marco DeLucca and Zadie Person, a local journalist investigating an acid mine spill, Darrick and Lourana push against everyone who tries to block the truth. Along the way, the bonds of love and friendship are tested, and bodies pile up on both sides.
In a town where the river flows orange and the founding—and controlling—family is rumored to “strip a man to the bones,” the conspiracy that bleeds Redbird runs as deep as the coal veins that feed it.
Heroines in Sondra Spatt Olsen's compelling stories often find themselves in bad situations: a wife with an irresponsible husband, an older woman who wants to leave her younger lover, a suburban housewife who wants sex with her doctor, a teacher who falls in love with her student, a young girl haunted by her mother's judgments, a demanding career woman unsettled by her boyfriend's success, a young woman who finds that her friends, when drunk, are potential murderers. But just as Chekhov gives us pleasure from moments of pain, Olsen illuminates the universal humor and pathos of bad situations.
Olsen brings bright wit, fresh empathy, and a generous dose of psychological insight to themes of abandonment and humiliation—her fiction offers a sort of transcendence from pain. These haunting, unsparing stories are not afraid to confront life's traps and pitfalls, but they do so with a celebration of the courage that rises amid the confusion all of us face.
This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of Olsen’s life, an authoritative text of “Tell Me a Riddle,” relevant essays by Olsen, seven critical essays, and a bibliography.
The contributors are: Joanne Trautmann Banks, Constance Coiner, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Mara Faulkner, Elaine Orr, Linda Ray Pratt, and Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Tillie Olsen spent her young adulthood there, in Kansas City, and in Faribault, Minnesota. She relocated to California in 1933 and lived most of her life in San Francisco. From 1962 on, she sojourned frequently in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Santa Cruz, and Soquel, California. She was a 1920s "hell-cat"; a 1930s revolutionary; an early 1940s crusader for equal pay for equal work and a war-relief patriot; an ex-GI's ideal wife in the later 1940s; a victim of FBI surveillance in the 1950s;a civil rights and antiwar advocate during the 1960s and 1970s; and a life-long orator for universal human rights.
The enigma of Tillie Olsen is intertwined with that of the twentieth century. From the rebellions in Czarist Russia, through the terrors of the Depression and the hopes of the New Deal, to World War II, the Nuremberg Trials, and the United Nations' founding, to the cold war and House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, to later progressive and repressive movements, the story of Olsen's life brings remote events into focus.
In her classic short story "I Stand Here Ironing" and her groundbreaking Tell Me a Riddle, Yonnondido, and Silences, Olsen scripted powerful, moving prose about ordinary people's lives, exposing the pervasive effects of sexism, racism, and classism and elevating motherhood and women's creativity into topics of study. Popularly referred to as "Saint Tillie," Olsen was hailed by many as the mother of modern feminism.
Based on diaries, letters, manuscripts, private documents, resurrected public records, and countless interviews, Reid's artfully crafted biography untangles some of the puzzling knots of the last century's triumphs and failures and speaks truth to legend, correcting fabrications and myths about and also by Tillie Olsen.
Four old men—John, Gino, Larry, and Frank—have been warehoused at "the Manor," a long-eroded home for the forgotten. The men take turns telling stories, stalling death as they relive pivotal parts of their pasts. Outside, the cliff crumbles and a lighthouse slips toward the sea.
John, in particular, enthralls the others with his tale of Tampico, Mexico, where he met an Indian woman named Chepa who owned a house at the edge of a mountain wilderness. She was his first love—and his first lesson in the dangers of foreign intrigue. But his is not the only memory haunted by mysteries born in Mexico. Sick of waiting for death, stirred by the shifting ground beneath their feet, the Manor's residents finally resolve to quit that place and head out for Tampico.
With inexorable pull, and exquisite scenes that could only come from Toby Olson, Tampico celebrates a sublime band of calaveras, "those skeleton messengers of mortality," who seek self-discovery even as their lives are ending.
An impressionistic memoir offers images of a life in progress, including scenes from Boyer Rickel’s rural Tempe, Arizona, childhood in the 1950s; his relationship with a physically shrinking father; his eccentric teenage friendships; his growing awareness of his sexuality among young, Hispanic gays; and a trip through Italy with his lover. A personal book, but also wholly universal, Taboo investigates the way one breaks through taboos and becomes a self-realized adult.
In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.
These Granite Islands is an arresting novel about a woman who, on her deathbed, recalls the haunting and fateful summer of 1936, a summer that forever changed her life. Sarah Stonich’s debut novel, set on the Iron Range of Minnesota, is an intimate and gripping story of a friendship, a portrait of marriage, and a meditation on the tragedy of loss.
A remarkably perceptive portrait of the Lone Star State, this collection of pieces from the New Yorker, the Nation, and other publications presents highlights of bestselling author Calvin Trillin’s classic writing on Texas subjects.
"Yes, I do have a Texas connection, but, as we say in the Midwest, where I grew up, not so's you'd know it." So Calvin Trillin introduces this collection of articles and poems about a place that turns up surprisingly often when he's ostensibly writing about something else. Whether reporting on the American scene for the New Yorker, penning comic verse and political commentary for the Nation, or writing his memoirs, Trillin has bumped into Texas again and again. He insists that "this has not been by design . . . there has simply been a lot going on in Texas." Astute readers will note, however, that Trillin's family immigrated to the United States through the port of Galveston, and, after reading this book, many will believe that the Lone Star State has somehow imprinted itself in the family's imagination.
Trillin on Texas gathers some of Trillin's best writing on subjects near to his heart—politics, true crime, food, and rare books, among them—which also have a Texas connection. Indulging his penchant for making "snide and underhanded jokes about respectable public officials," he offers his signature sardonic take on the Bush dynasty and their tendency toward fractured syntax; a faux, but quite believable, LBJ speech; and wry portraits of assorted Texas county judges, small town sheriffs, and Houston immigration lawyers. Trillin takes us on a mouthwatering pilgrimage to the barbecue joint that Texas Monthly proclaimed the best in Texas and describes scouting for books with Larry McMurtry—who rejects all of his "sleepers." He tells the stories of two teenagers who dug up half a million dollars in an ice chest on a South Texas ranch and of rare book dealer Johnny Jenkins, who was found floating in the Colorado River with a bullet wound in the back of his head. And he recounts how redneck movie reviewer "Joe Bob Briggs" fueled a war between Dallas's daily newspapers and pays tribute to two courageous Texas women who spoke truth to power—Molly Ivins and Sissy Farenthold.
Sure to entertain Texans and other folks alike, Trillin on Texas proves once again that Calvin Trillin is one of America's shrewdest observers and wittiest writers.
Winner of the 1995 Banta Book Prize for a Wisconsin Author
Ronald Wallace is best known for his wit and good humor, his synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, his sensory immediacy, his accessibility, and charm. Now in Time's Fancy, his fifth collection, Wallace explores the tragic aspects of life more fully, fashioning a declarative poetry that is darker and deeper, more meditative and complex.
As children, two sisters make homes for their toys out of matchboxes and shoeboxes, trying to create safe places after the loss of their mother to psychosis.
Grace, a schoolteacher married to a doctor, appears to have a conventional life but has a breakdown during a undesired move her beloved cottage to another house. Dinah has married a once self-ordained preacher with a troubled past and tries to keep her children safely separate from the world. Meanwhile, a childhood friend is linked to a militia’s abortive attempt to blow up the FBI’s fingerprint records facility in West Virginia, and later builds an isolated survivalist compound in the mountains.
These three adults, closely bonded in childhood, are reunited on this acreage once owned by a white supremacist group, where they discover in various ways that there is no final protection, no matter how hard they strive to find it or make it.
Eleanor Wilner’s poems attempt to absorb the shock of the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their litany of loss, in their outrage and sorrow, they retain the joy in life, mercy for the mortal condition, and praise for the plenitude of nature and the gifts of human artistry.
As with her six earlier collections, these poems are drawn from the transpersonal realm of history and cultural memory, but they display an increasing horror at the bloody repetitions of history, its service of death, and the destructive savagery of power separated from intelligence and restraint. The poems describe “a sordid drama” in which the players wear “eyeless masks,” and the only thing time changes is the name of the enemy. Underneath it all, driving “the art that” in both senses “keeps nothing at bay,” swim the enormous formal energies of life, the transitive figure that moves on in the depths, something glimpsed in the first light, something stronger than hope.
“It is a relief to come across work in which a moral intelligence is matched by aesthetic refinement, in which the craft of the poems is equal to their concerns.”--Christian Wiman, Poetry
In the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.
Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier, Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context of a wild, but troubled, life.
Craig Wright is one of the most widely produced, consistently entertaining playwrights of his generation. The three plays gathered in this volume—Melissa Arctic (winner of the 2005 Helen Hayes Award), Orange Flower Water, and The Pavilion—are all set in the fictional town of Pine City, Minnesota. The plays share a focus on love and relationships and feature a consistent undercurrent of observation and speculation about the nature of time. Melissa Arctic brings Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale into the present, retaining the original’s captivating mix of the comic and tragic. A brutally frank exploration of marriage, Orange Flower Water examines the irresistible lure and poisonous effects of unrealistic expectations within love, and portrays the inescapably compromised contours of relationships founded on adultery. The Pavilion, a lyrical and rueful homage to Our Town, is a meditation on dashed dreams and unquenchable hopes, set at a twenty-year high school reunion. In all three plays, Wright shows himself to be one of the most perceptive and engaging playwrights working today.
Winner of the 2019 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize
Inside the dodo bird is a forest, Inside the forest
a peach analog, Inside the peach analog a woman, Inside
the woman a lake of funerals
This layering of bird, woman, place, technology, and ceremony, which begins this first full-length collection by Zaina Alsous, mirrors the layering of insights that marks the collection as a whole. The poems in A Theory of Birds draw on inherited memory, historical record, critical theory, alternative geographies, and sharp observation. In them, birds—particularly extinct species—become metaphor for the violences perpetrated on othered bodies under the colonial gaze.
Putting ecological preservation in conversation with Arab racial formation, state vernacular with the chatter of birds, Alsous explores how categorization can be a tool for detachment, domination, and erasure. Stretching their wings toward de-erasure, these poems—their subjects and their logics—refuse to stay put within a single category. This is poetry in support of a decolonized mind.
It is 1883, and all of Klara Bozic’s girlish dreams have come crashing down as she arrives in Thirsty, a gritty steel town carved into the slopes above the Monongahela River just outside of Pittsburgh. She has made a heartbreaking discovery. Her new husband Drago is as abusive as the father she left behind in Croatia.
In Kristin Bair O’Keeffe’s debut novel, Klara’s life unfolds over forty years as she struggles to find her place in a new country where her survival depends on the friends who nurture her: gutsy, funny Katherine Zupanovic, who isn‘t afraid of Drago’s fist; BenJo, the only black man in Thirsty to have his own shop; and strangely enough, Old Man Rupert, the town drunk.
Thirsty follows a chain of unlikely events that keep Klara’s spirit aloft: a flock of angelic butterflies descends on Thirsty; Klara gives birth to her first child in Old Man Rupert’s pumpkin patch; and BenJo gives her a talking bird. When Klara’s daughter marries a man even more brutal than Drago, Klara is forced to act. If she doesn’t finally break the cycle of violence in her family, her granddaughters will one day walk the same road, broken and bruised. As the threads that hold her family together fray and come undone, Klara has to decide if she has the courage to carve out a peaceful spot in the world for herself and her girls.
Queer stories about love, loneliness, the surreal, and the self
The stories in Tell Me feature queer men of various ages reckoning with loneliness, selfishness, and the struggle for self-discovery and identity. In “The Vanisher,” a young bisexual man struggling with his own desire to be seen receives a bandana that allows him to become invisible. In “Retreat,” a widower travels to an artists’ colony to seek an audience with his recently deceased husband. And in “We Are Rendered Silent,” people lose their ability to speak when a man they love dies. Through Baumann’s inventive employment of the strange and surreal, these stories set out to explore the bizarre and often confounding experience of navigating modern-day queerness. With his unique voice and magnificent imagination, Baumann fully immerses readers in the queer experience.
The Tenant of Fire is about Queens, NY—its history, public and personal, real and imagined. Many of the people who populate this book—Irish Catholics, Italian-Americans—were once considered ethnic but now fall wholly under the banner of white. And from their anxieties a man like Donald Trump emerges. Born and raised in Queens, Trump is both the product and purveyor of a localized nativist politic.
The young white speaker of these poems works to record his parents’ and neighbors’, both white and of color, and his own attempts at navigating a shifting landscape. In poems on the homecoming of Vietnam vets, or the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, or the firebombing of Malcolm X’s house, The Tenant of Fire explores how and why the plurality of a place like Queens, where now nearly two hundred languages are spoken, is viewed as a threat to national security.
These plays by Andy Bragen examine the intimacies and shadows that exist between parents and children. In This Is My Office, a guided tour through an empty office becomes the unexpected portal to a forgotten New York and a father’s legacy. This play brings you face-to-face with a narrator who finds his way through doubt, soul-sickness, and doughnut cravings by telling you a story. Not the one he meant to tell, but a richer one about family, redemption, and love.
The autobiographical Notes on My Mother’s Decline evokes the final days of a woman’s life. Late at night, while his baby daughter sleeps, a son takes notes on his mother’s daily life and scenes from their complicated relationship. He is shaping a play, as well as a perspective. Two blocks away, his mother naps, smokes, reads, and drinks coffee. She is shaping her existence within encroaching confines. Bragen plumbs silences and one-sided conversations to ask how we come to know one another as parents and as children. How do we care for those we love, and what does it take to live with—and without—them?
What happened to Ebenezer Scrooge after the night he was visited by the three spirits?
When we left Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol, he appeared to be a man transformed. But did he sincerely repent and earn admission to heaven? The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge, written in Dickensian style and with tongue firmly lodged in cheek, follows Scrooge through the Court of Heavenly Justice, where his soul’s fate is to be determined. In this courtroom drama, using frequent flashbacks, the author uncovers startling evidence, much of it directly from Dickens’s classic, that reveals Scrooge to have lived a saintly life before being confronted by three Christmas ghosts. Evidence mounts that Mr. Scrooge struck a Faustian bargain with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, a deal to extend his own mortality in exchange for yielding his soul as a tool for the forces of darkness to infiltrate heaven. Readers will enjoy the remaking of some of Dickens’s best-known characters. Tiny Tim emerges as a villain, while little Eppie, borrowed from George Eliot’s Silas Marner, is Scrooge’s protector and source of salvation. This new novel provides the much-needed redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge’s reputation and offers a welcome departure from the standard saccharine fare at Christmastime. Dickens buffs will have a merry time trying to find where Dickens’s voice ends and the author’s begins. All readers will puzzle over how we could have so misjudged Ebenezer Scrooge, or whether we judged Scrooge aright from the start.Peter Coyote’s first collection of poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the Sixties to psychedelic spirituality and beyond. Written over several decades, these poems read as a collage, each piece distinct and contributing to a cohesive lyric narrative.
Garrick Davis’s Terminal Diagrams may have been inspired by the illustrated maps in airport lounges, or perhaps they are the blueprints of the Apocalypse, with their subjects and objects representing the bitter fruits of either some future nightmare or the present world. Regardless, their vision is so bleak and unsparing, only a few will be able to savor them. Here, the art of poetry has been mechanized just as the world has been mechanized. Whether his subject is a car accident on the freeways of Los Angeles or the Book of Revelation transmitted by television, Davis’s stanzas conjure a kind of futuristic noir. In poem after poem, he examines the artistic possibilities of the machine, and its alterations of human experience, with a modern spirit that—as Baudelaire defined it—has embraced “the sublimity and monstrousness of something new.”
Trickster Academy is a collection of poems that explore being Native in Academia—from land acknowledgement statements, to mascots, to the histories of using Native American remains in anthropology. Jenny L. Davis’ collection brings humor and uncomfortable realities together in order to challenge the academy and discuss the experience of being Indigenous in university classrooms and campuses. Organized around the premise of the Trickster Academy— a university space run by, and meant for training, Tricksters— this collection moves between the personal dynamics of a Two-Spirit/queer Indigenous woman in spaces where there are few, if any, others and a Trickster’s critique of those same spaces.
Trickster Academy is playful at times, yet more complicated and salient issues are at the heart of these poems. Davis’ Trickster Academy deeply challenges the institutions that still hold Indigenous remains in their archives and storage rooms, and the insincerities of the academy when it comes to acknowledging Indigenous peoples. The realities that the poems in Trickster Academy address are not only relevant to people in academic positions. From leaving home, to being the only Indian in the room, to having to deal with the constant pressures to being a ‘real Indian’, these poems illuminate the shared experiences of Indians across many regions, and all of us who live amongst Tricksters.Ticket to Minto, Sohrab Homi Fracis's premier fiction collection, offers readers a passage to an unfamiliar destination-a world suspended between East and West, India and America, home and away.
With piercing insight, Fracis expertly reveals the underlying differences between immersion in India's culture-Hindu, Muslim, or Parsi-and life as an Indian in America. Alternating between East and West, the stories in Ticket to Minto serve as companion pieces, interrelated across continents in both theme and content. A middle-aged man's search for love in Bombay is contrasted with an Indian American family's hopes for the marriage of their westernized daughter. A university student rushes to save the life of a servant in his homeland only to find his own life threatened while attending graduate school in America.
Poignant and daring, Ticket to Minto underlines the harsh realization that the immigrant never truly arrives but is in constant limbo between two worlds. As one character relates, "There's a part of me that's American and a part that's Indian. I'm clear about that and comfortable with it, except that sometimes people want me to be just the one or the other."
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