Anna Lee Walters (Pawnee-Otoe)
The eight simple, moving tales collected here portray contemporary Native American life. The stark reality of a contemporary insular society is skillfully blended with the centuries-old culture that is a backdrop for the stories told by Walters's memorable people. "The Resurrection of John Stink" tells of an apparently epileptic man who's tended by 19-year-old Effie, who falls in love with him. After a seizure, John Stink stops breathing, and the white doctor Effie's fetched declares him dead. But when he's buried in a mound, his dogs won't leave him, so Effie digs him outaliveand he lives to be a very old man. At times, the narrative tends towards self-consciousness in its replication of a rich oral tradition, but this is a clear ethnic voice that deserves a wide audience.
Firebrand Books

D'Arcy McNickle (Salish/Kootenai)
Educated at a federal Indian boarding school, Archilde is torn not only between white and Indian cultures but also between love for his Spanish father and his Indian mother, who in her old age is rejecting white culture and religion to return to the ways of her people. Archilde's young contemporaries, meanwhile, are succumbing to the destructive influence of reservation life, growing increasingly uprooted, dissolute, and hopeless. Although Archilde plans to leave the reservation after a brief visit, his entanglements delay his departure until he faces destruction by the white mans law.

In an early review of The Surrounded, Oliver La Farge praised it as simple, clear, direct, devoid of affectations, and fast-moving. He included it in his small list of creditable modern novels using the first Americans as theme. Several decades later, long out of print but not forgotten, The Surrounded is still considered one of the best works of fiction by or about Native Americans.
University of New Mexico Press

Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d' Alene)

The Toughest Indian in the World offers so many pleasures, who could deny it the power to disturb us as well? Funny, dreamlike, heartbreaking, angry--these are stories that could have been written by no one but Sherman Alexie. - Mary Park

Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve (Lakota)
Grade 4-8. Combining traditions from her own Lakota heritage and her husband's Norwegian background, Sneve weaves a thought-provoking story of the Sioux trickster Iktomi's encounter with a giant Troll who followed members of the Norwegian family he has guarded for generations to this country.
University of Nebraska Press

Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa)
Creating a framing device of prologue and epilogue, Vizenor presents vignettes, some stingingly satirical and many based on his experiences in the academic world. In the prologue, Vizenor's protagonist, Sergeant Alex Hobriser, a name that is clearly satirical, comments on Eastman Shicer, who is both a cultural anthropologist and an aerobics instructor. This juxtaposition of professions provides a clue of what will follow.
University of Oklahoma Press

Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki)

3rd in the Dawn Land series. Young Hunter is confronted by a dual menace --a giant water monster and a dark-minded mteoulin. (Fiction)
Hardscrabble Books

Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki)

3rd in the Dawn Land series. Young Hunter is confronted by a dual menace --a giant water monster and a dark-minded mteoulin. (Fiction)
Hardscrabble Books

N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa)
The paperback edition of The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth.  The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself.
University of New Mexico Press

Diane Glancy (Cherokee)
A  collection of essays, this book is a meditation on "the making of story." It brings together photographs and previously published writings-parts of lectures, reviews, chapters from other works, poems, analytical essays, autobiography-in order to retell the story of a personal journey.
University of Minnesota Press

Robert Conley (Cherokee)
The year is 1540. The Cherokee have only heard of Spanish invaders. But on the Gulf Coast, De Soto pushes north in his quest for gold, burning villages in his wake. He's accompanied by Deadwood Lighter, a Cherokee slave seized many years before who realizes that his people would never survive an attack. Deadwood Lighter knows he is the last hope for the Cherokee.
University of Oklahoma Press