From Publishers Weekly
Jones paints a bleak picture in this collection about Native American men struggling to break the circle of violence, alcoholism and broken families that circumscribes their lives. "Halloween," the opening short short, sets the tone: a brutal father initiates his six-, nine- and 12-year-old sons into manhood by teaching them to smoke cigarettes and drink beer on national holidays. "Bile" revisits an all-too-familiar Native American tragedy, as a young man and his family wait helplessly while his hospitalized father succumbs to the ravages of cirrhosis. Jones concludes the collection of 17 stories with "Discovering America," a terse, furious summary of discrimination against Native Americans narrated by a young drifter who fumes inside as he encounters stereotyping and racism across the country. The constant threat or fact of violence in these stories combined with Jones's idiosyncratic, staccato prose makes for gripping and visceral reading, but these oblique, barely sketched pieces can also be difficult and disorienting. Still, in his evocation of young men grasping for hope while ruled by anger and helplessness, Jones shows talent.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Jones, an English professor and Blackfoot author with three novels to his credit, here brings his stinging commentary to 16 stories, each one illuminating a small part of what it's like to be an Indian in contemporary America. In one bittersweet tale, two white kids mistake an Indian's red pickup for their uncle's as they hop in for the trip to school. Not-so-subtle prejudice runs high as everyone he encounters in his role as unwilling abductor presumes his guilt. Drugs and alcohol infuse many stories, some ending tragically in their portrayal of the harsh realities of life on and just off the reservation. The concluding story, "Discovering America," brilliantly encapsulates the whole collection, as a young man writing a play travels from Florida to Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico. Guilty of "Driving While Indian," he is greeted with suspicious glances, called "Chief," and asked if he has "scalped anybody today." Jones' sardonic tale reveals the sort of casual stereotyping and prejudice that never seems to disappear. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"The concluding story, 'Discovering America,' brilliantly encapsulates the whole collection... Jones' sardonic tale reveals the sort of casual stereotyping and prejudice that never seems to disappear." Booklist "I thought these stories were amazing. A Native Stuart Dybek, clean prose with a skewed lens and a bite--yes, this is it." Diane Glancy, author of Designs of the Night Sky "Stephen Jones is a visionary storier; he has created marvelous, fantastic narratives at the ironic edge of ordinary experience and reality." Gerald Vizenor, author of Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57
Book Description
We stare at each other because we don't know which tribe, and then nod at the last possible instant. Standard procedure. You pick it up the first time a white friend leads you across a room just to stand you up by another Indian, arrange you like furniture, like you should have something to say to each other.
As one character after another tells it in these stories, much that happens to them does so because "I'm an Indian." And, as Stephen Graham Jones tells it in one remarkable story after another, the life of an Indian in modern America is as rich in irony as it is in tradition. A noted Blackfeet writer, Jones offers a nuanced and often biting look at the lives of Native peoples from the inside. A young Indian mans journey to discover America results in an unsettling understanding of relations between whites and Natives in the twenty-first century, a relationship still fueled by mistrust, stereotypes, and almost casual violence. A character waterproofs his boots with transmission fluid; another steals into Glacier National Park to hunt. One man uses watermelon to draw flies off poached deer; another, in a modern twist on the captivity narrative, kidnaps a white girl in a pickup truck; and a son bleeds into the father carrying him home.
Rife with arresting and poignant images, fleeting and daring in presentation, weighty and provocative in their messages, these stories demonstrate the power of one of the most compelling writers in Native North America today.
About the Author
Stephen Graham Jones is an assistant professor of English at Texas Tech University. He is the author of the novels The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, All the Beautiful Sinners, and The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto.
