“Fiction is the lie that helps us tell the truth.” 

The Things They Carried is a semi-autobiographical collection of interconnected short stories, some of them loosely structured fragments and vignettes, that represent O’Brien’s reflections on the Vietnam War experience, written at the age of 43. 

The Things They Carried was first published in 1990, twenty years after Tim O’Brien returned home from the Vietnam War.  In 2010 a 20-year anniversary edition was published of this now-classic work.

New York Times Reviewer Robert R. Harris considers The Things We Carried an exceptional war narrative because O’Brien is able to move “beyond the horror of the fighting to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear, by questioning the role that imagination plays in helping to form our memories and our own versions of truth”

Although these stories are often brutal and graphic, for which the book has been placed on many Banned Book lists, it is the psychological effects of war and its aftermath that are the focus of O’Brien’s writing. 

In “The Things They Carried,” the collection’s first and strongest story and arguably one of the best short narratives written about the Vietnam War, O’Brien introduces the seven grunts of his platoon—the Alpha Group.  We follow them into the jungles of Vietnam and grow to know them individually through the litany of things they lug with them into combat—the tangible and the intangible as well as the physical and the psychological.

Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck for good luck.  Kiowa carried his grandfather’s feathered hatchet and his grandmother’s distrust of the white man. Rat Kiley carried comic books and M&Ms.  Norman Bowker carried the thumb of a VC corpse.  Ted Lavender was carrying toilet paper and tranquilizers when he was shot and killed.  Lee Strunk carried a slingshot as “a weapon of last resort.” 

In addition to the individual things these men carry with them day after day, O’Brien also describes what they carry in common:

“Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.  They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct.  They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery.  They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds.  They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky.” (p. 14)

And he describes the psychological burden of the “greatest fear” carried by these soldiers wherever they go:

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die.  Grief, terror, love, longing—these were the intangible, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.  They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.  They carried their reputations.  They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing.  Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.  They died so as not to die of embarrassment.  (p. 20)

Although these soldiers often dump the tangible things they carry to lighten their loads as they trudge through the bush, the heavier psychological burdens they carry, including witnessing one another's deaths, cannot be cast off. 

Several grunts of the Alpha Group appear in later stories in the collection as they hump the boonies or die in combat or struggle to find their way back into the real world and give meaning to their new lives. 

O’Brien’s first grenade victim is introduced in the powerful story “The Man I Killed.”  Scarred by guilt following the incident, O’Brien is continually haunted by the dead soldier’s image which he has memorized in detail. He tortures himself by fantasizing “a constellation of possibilities” that could have awaited this young man, had he lived.  “The man I killed” was possibly a mathematics scholar, O’Brien imagines, who “took pleasure in the grace and beauty of differential equations” and dreamed of being a teacher.   He wrote romantic poems at night and had fallen in love with a classmate who liked his quiet manner.  Although he was not a fighter, “the man I killed” had been taught “that to defend the land was a man’s highest duty and highest privilege.” (p. 119)  He had accepted this patriotic duty, but he hoped and prayed that the Americans would go away so that his bravery would not be tested, lest he disgrace his family and village.

“The man I killed” reappears in the next story, “Ambush,” as O’Brien imagines telling his daughter about throwing the grenade outside of the village of My Khe that blew the sandals off the young soldier.   “Even now I haven’t finished sorting it out,” he confides.

“Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don’t.  In the ordinary hours of life I try not to dwell on it, but now and then, when I’m reading a newspaper or just sitting alone in a room, I’ll look up and see the young man step out of the morning fog.”  (p. 128)

“How to Tell a True War Story” is a recurring theme woven throughout the book, but the story that bears that title explores the relationship between storytelling and the war experience and the difficulty in trying to find an elusive truth, especially when the distinctions between memory and imagination become blurred over time. O’Brien writes: 

“For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent.  There is no clarity. Everything swirls.  The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true.  Right spills over into wrong.  Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.  The vapors suck you in.  You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”  (p. 78)

Telling the truth about war, O’Brien acknowledges, is nearly impossible because war is a contradiction. “War is hell,” he writes, “but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.  War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery.” (p. 76).  Generalizing about war, according to O’Brien “is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true.  Almost nothing is true.”  (p. 77)

But this much is true, according to O’Brien: “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever.” (p. 72)

Although “The Things They Carried” is the collection’s strongest story, “On the Rainy River” is my favorite. The only story in the collection that takes place before O’Brien goes to Vietnam, it is a powerfully emotional account of a young man’s struggle with his conscience before making the “cowardly” decision to go to war. 

It’s hard to differentiate O’Brien the fiction writer from O’Brien the 21-year-old narrator who receives his draft notice in this story:

“I remember opening up the letter, scanning the first few lines feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head.  It wasn’t thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once—I was too good for this war. Too smart too compassionate, too everything.  It couldn’t happen.  I was above it.  I had the world dicked—Phi beta Kappa and summa cum laude and president of the student body and a full-ride scholarship for grad studies at Harvard.  A mistake, maybe—a foul-up in the paperwork. I was no soldier.  I hated Boy Scouts. I hated camping out.  I hated dirt and tents and mosquitoes. The sight of blood made me queasy, and I couldn’t tolerate authority, and I didn’t know a rifle from a slingshot.  I was a liberal, for Christ sake: If they needed fresh bodies, why not draft some back-to-the-stone-age hawk?” (pp. 39-40)

Uncertain whether to flee north or head to Vietnam, the narrator spends six days alone on the American-Canadian border, agonizing over his decision.  He comes within 20 yards of the Canadian border and then instantly sweeps readers right into the middle of his emotional quandary (This is Tim O’Brien at his best):

“You’re at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River.  You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest.

What would you do?

Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you’re leaving behind?  Would it hurt?  Would it feel like dying?  Would you cry, as I did?” (p. 54)

Although the narrator insists he tried to will himself overboard, he found he could not do it.  Not unlike “the man I killed” in Vietnam who reluctantly went to war to defend his land, the narrator could not risk the embarrassment to his family, his town, and himself by deserting his country.  “I couldn’t make myself brave,” he confesses.  “I would go to the war,” he writes, “I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.” (p. 57)

Discussing "On the Rainy River," O'Brien War explains how it qualifies as a "war story," even though it doesn't fit the traditional mold:

"Stories aren't always about war, per se. They aren't about bombs and bullets and military maneuvers. They aren't about tactics, they aren't about foxholes and canteens. War stories, like any good story, is finally about the human heart. About the choices we make, or fail to make. The forfeitures in our lives. Stories are to console and to inspire and to help us heal. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. And a good war story, in my opinion, is a story that strikes you as important, not for war content, but for its heart content." 

Even though O'Brien spent the summer of 1968 working in a pig slaughter factory and has never been near the Rainy River, "in my own heart," he says, "I was certainly on that rainy river, trying to decide what to do, whether to go to the war or not go to it, say no or say yes...  That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth."

Raised in a small prairie town in Minnesota, Tim O'Brien had a  typical childhood playing shortstop for the Little League baseball team ("couldn't field, couldn't hit, couldn't run, couldn't throw - otherwise, a pretty good shortstop") and escaping the  monotony of small-town life reading books at the local county library. 

At Macalester College in St. Paul O'Brien excelled academically and was elected student body president. There he participated in several protests against the escalating Vietnam War, believing that because he was a good student he would not be drafted—a denial that was short-lived.  Shortly after graduating in 1968 with a BA in political science, he received his draft notice.  In a 1990 interview with the New York Times O’Brien recalls how the summer he received his draft notice was the beginning of his writing career:

"I went to my room in the basement and started pounding the typewriter. I did it all summer. It was the most terrible summer of my life, worse than being in the war. My conscience kept telling me not to go, but my whole upbringing told me I had to. That horrible summer made me a writer. I don't know what I wrote. I've still got it, reams of it, but I'm not willing to look at it. It was just stuff—bitter, bitter stuff, and it's probably full of self-pity. But that was the beginning."

O’Brien served his tour of duty the 46th Infantry in Quang Ngai province and received a Purple Heart for an injury sustained when he was hit with shrapnel during a grenade attack.  He continued his graduate studies at Harvard and served an internship with the Washington Post.  In 1973 O’Brien turned to full time writing with the publication of his war memoir entitled If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home.

O’Brien has a passion for storytelling.  "My life is storytelling," he said in a 1990 New York Times interview.  "I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead…Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.”

O’Brien has received numerous awards for his novels and short stories.

He currently teaches creative writing at Texas State University-San Marcos.

Tim O’Brien’s writing style floats somewhere between fact and fiction (or a mixture of both).  "As a fiction writer," O'Brien explains, "I do not write just about the world we live in, but I also write about the world we ought to live in, and could, which is a world of imagination." 

Although he is the primary narrator of The Things They Carried, he is also a character in many of the stories (and sometimes both).

His approach wavers between that of an objective observer or a painfully involved poet (or a mixture of both).  His imagery can be brutal but it can also be beautiful. A Big Read introduction to the book characterizes O’Brien’s writing as “brimming with raw honesty and thoughtful reflection.”

For a war that had a surreal quality to it and was ambiguous at best, O’Brien’s approach to writing about it seems like a very appropriate fit.

Writing stories, for O’Brien, involves blending reality and fantasy.  "By telling stories, you objectify your own experience,” he said during a 1995 Pioneer Press interview. “You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not, in fact, occur but that help to clarify and explain. Reality just doesn't matter. You don't stop reading 'Huck Finn' every few pages and tell yourself this didn't happen. A good story feels real."

Miller characterizes Meloy’s writing strengths as “stubbornly old-fashioned ones: a spare yet meticulous realism, concentrated character study, and, above all, the restraint and precision of her prose” 

While her writing may be spare, writes Creek, her prose “has a storyteller’s fluidity and seeming effortlessness."  She has been praised for her narrative economy, keen observations, and depiction of human weaknesses and emotions.

In both her novels and short stories New York Times Book Review Reviewer Curtis Sittenfeld writes that  Meloy  demonstrates “a gift for animating the seemingly banal. She possesses the ability to skirt the edge of sentimentality and melodrama, then elevate the entire work to high art.”

A native of Helena, Montana who now lives in Los Angeles, Maile Meloy is the author of two adult novels, one young adult novel, and two short story collections.  Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review.  Meloy has won several writing awards, and her stories have been published in several journals, including The New Yorker.

In a 2012 interview with the Daily Beast, American Indian (a description he prefers to Native American) novelist, poet, and short story writer Sherman Alexie explains the origin of the title of his latest collection of short stories (15 previously published stories together with 16 new ones).

"'I called the book Blasphemy primarily because I’ve been so regularly accused of being blasphemous by white folks and Indians. But they only speak of blasphemy in its most basic terms: disrespect toward religion, toward a philosophy. I think blasphemy is actually more directed toward other human beings, and most often expressed toward those who have lesser power in society. I think human beings are sacred and that all the evil shit each of us does is blasphemous…'"

Alexie’s characters are both sacred and blasphemous, many of them “wayward warriors alienated by modern-day existence,” Toronto Star reviewer Dimitri Nasrallah reminds us.

While some of his characters still live on “the rez,” Alexie has primarily become the voice of the new “urban Indian” of the Pacific Northwest.  His characters are caught between two worlds, “living with one foot off the reservation, and one foot perpetually in” as Huffington Post reviewer Gazelle Emami describes. 

Even though they may be “assimilated,” Alexie’s characters are “conquered people living among the conquerers” who give you the distinct impression that they are and probably always will be “on the outside looking in,” writes reviewer Richard Marcus.  “There’s something about their lives which makes you realize they’re always going to be separate and not equal no matter how much they try to blend.

As the Indian college student Corliss in “The Search Engine” points out: “We are people exiled by other exiles, by Puritans, Pilgrims, Protestants, and all of those other crazy white people thrown out of a crazier Europe. We who were once indigenous to this land must immigrate into its culture.”  (p. 401)

Alexie’s characters suffer from loneliness, grief, depression, racism, identity issues, failed relationships, infidelity, estrangement, substance abuse and poverty as they “struggle to survive the constant battering of their minds, bodies, and spirits by white American society and their own self-hatred and sense of powerlessness.”

Sometimes suicide is the only escape:

When state troopers question the narrator and his friends about the apparent suicide of one of their tribe members in “Indian Education,” they all shrug their shoulders and look at the ground.

“‘Don’t know,’” we all said, but when we look in the mirror, see the history of our tribe in our eyes, taste failure in the tap water, and shake with old tears, we understand completely.” (p.292)

What keeps Alexie’s writing from being completely maudlin is the way he balances pathos with humor, earning the distinction of the “great, tragicomic bard of the modern Native American experience, according to Los Angeles Times reviewer Hector Tobar.

Alexie’s brand of humor is often dark and sometimes irreverent but always funny.  His characters often “wobble between sanity and madness” writes Emami.   The laughter keeps them sane, the loneliness drives them mad, and sometimes, you're not sure which is which.”

Alexie’s descriptions of Indians and their ways of being often poke fun at his own culture, lightening the heaviness of the issues.  In “Cry Cry Cry” he explains that the person chosen as Head Man Dancer in a powwow is often the winner of a popularity contest.  “Powwow is like high school,” he writes,” except with more feathers and beads.”  (p. 2)

In “Do You Know Where I Am?” the story’s “half-breed” child-narrator is sent by his mother to live with his grandparents on the Spokane Reservation each summer to “keep in touch with my tribal heritage.” (p. 265)  “But mostly,” he confesses, “I read spy novels to my grandfather and shopped garage sales and secondhand stores with my grandmother.  I suppose, for many Indians, garage sales and trashy novels are highly traditional and sacred.  We all make up our ceremonies as we go along, right?” (p. 265)

In “Scenes from a Life” a filmmaker making a short film about cranberry bogs gathers the Indian bog workers on the last day of filming for a group picture. As they begin to giggle, the director asks, “‘What’s so funny?’”

“One of the Indians, a woman, stopped giggling long enough to speak.

‘We’re laughing,’ she said, ‘because white people always want to take photos of Indians. But you’re taking a picture of us at work. It might be the first photo ever taken of Indians working.’”
(p. 235)

Although Indians clearly resent White Americans’ propensity to romanticize them, it doesn’t keep Corliss in “The Search Engine” from taking full advantage of it.

“Corliss didn’t want to live with a white roommate, either, no matter how interesting he or she might become.  Hell, even if Emily Dickinson were resurrected and her reclusive-hermit-unrequited love addict gene removed from her DNA, Corliss wouldn’t have wanted to room with her. White people, no matter how smart, were too romantic about Indians. White people looked at the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the full moon, newborn babies, and Indians with the same goofy sentimentalism.  Being a smart Indian, Corliss had always taken advantage of this romanticism, but that didn’t mean she wanted to share the refrigerator with it.  If white folks assumed she was serene and spiritual and wise simply because she was an Indian, and thought she was special based on those mistaken assumptions, then Corliss saw no reason to contradict them. The world is a competitive place, and a poor Indian girl needs all the advantages she can get.  So if George W. Bush, a man who possessed no remarkable distinctions other than being the son of a former U. S. president, could also become president, then Corliss figured she could certainly benefit from positive ethnic stereotypes and not feel any guilt about it. For five centuries, Indians were slaughtered because they were Indians, so it Corliss received a free coffee now and again from the local free-range lesbian Indiophile, who could possibly find the wrong in that?” (p. 369)

White Americans don’t get off easily, either. Alexie pokes fun at the dominant culture as well and intermixes commentary on the way American Indians have been mistreated and stereotyped by White Americans. 

“‘My father never taught me about hope,’” confesses the narrator of “The Toughest Indian in the World.” “‘Instead, he continually told me that our salmon—our hope—would never come back, and though such lessons may seem cruel, I know enough to cover my heart in any crowd of white people.’” (p. 27)

The student whose educational experiences are chronicled in “Indian Education” (perhaps partly autobiographical?) gets an early taste of White American expectations in second grade when his teacher writes a note home to his parents demanding that they cut his braids or keep him at home (they refuse). In third grade his “traditional Native American art career” ends with his first portrait entitled “Stick Indian Taking a Piss in My Backyard.”  After Mrs. Schluter confiscates his artwork, he “stood alone in the corner, faced the wall, and waited for the punishment to end.  I’m still waiting,” he writes. (p. 287)

In “The Toughest Indian in the World” two American Indians renting a room at the Pony Soldier Motel notice a painting hanging over their bed in which the U. S. Cavalry is “kicking the crap out of a band of renegade Indians.”

“What tribe do you think they are?” I asked the fighter.

“All of them,” he said. (p. 38)

Custer is still alive and well in the 21st Century, declares Corliss in “The Search Engine.”  Instead of bludgeoning Indian skulls, the U. S. government now “kills Indians by dumping huge piles of paperwork on their skulls. But Indians made themselves easy targets for bureaucratic skull-crushing, didn’t they?  Indians took numbers and lined up for skull-crushing.  They’d rather die standing together in long lines than wandering alone in the wilderness.”  (p. 368)

“This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” has to be my favorite story in this collection.   It was the basis for one of my favorite independent films, Smoke Signals, for which Alexie wrote the screenplay. 

The story has a contemporary Washington reservation setting and offers a glance into the poverty and despair that prevails there.  It is really a collection of short short stories within a story that bounce back and forth in time.  When all the pieces of the story puzzle come together, “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” is ultimately a story about healing, identity, and relationships. It focuses on two young Indian men, once childhood friends, who parted ways as they grew older and took different paths, Victor shedding his identity and adopting a shallow view of the world while the more philosophical and visionary Thomas Builds-the-Fire (one of my favorite Alexie characters) clings to Indian traditions, “thinks too much” according to Victor, and tries to preserve the art of storytelling, even though most people stopped listening long ago. 

A journey to Arizona (primarily financed by Thomas Builds-the-Fire because Victor is broke) to pick up the cremated remains of Victor’s estranged father reunites the two as they begin to realize they need one another, despite their differences.  And their differences are dramatically evidenced near the end of the story in the way that each views the spreading of the ashes of Victor’s father at Spokane Falls.  Thomas has a beautiful vision of Victor’s father rising liking a salmon, finding his way home. But the more literal Victor can’t imagine his father “looking anything like a salmon.”  He tells Thomas, “I thought it’d be like cleaning the attic or something.  Like letting things go after they’ve stopped having any use.” (p. 90).  But Thomas disagrees, insisting that “nothing stops.” 

Alexie’s writing style is simple and straightforward, laced with sardonic wit, irony and large doses of dark comedy. His style also has a poetic quality stemming from the fact that Alexie began his writing career as a poet. Typing on a manual typewriter when he first began, he tried to contain his poems to one page. “I had this thing about going beyond one page, typewritten,” he said.  “I’d get to the bottom of a page and freak out, because I wouldn’t know what to do next. But the stories kept getting bigger and bigger…They began to demand more space than a poem could provide.”

Alexie is often experimental in the stories collected here.  Some are only two pages long. Some include poems.  Nontraditional titles such as “Because My Father Always Said We Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock” and  “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” certainly catch attention in the Table of Contents. 
“War Dances” is a mixture of lists, quizzes, poetry and an “exit interview,” loosely woven into a story about the death of the narrator’s father.  “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” is narrated in segments denoted by the hour of the day that events are happening.  Alexie is not afraid to take bold risks in content or form.  

Alexie’s “no-holds barred” approach to writing, described by Publishers Weekly  as spiced with plenty of “bawdiness” and “wicked humor,” has caused him to become a controversial figure among both Indians and White Americans. Alexie responds:  “‘I've come to the realization that many people have been reading literary fiction for the same reason they read mainstream fiction, for entertainment and a form of escape. I don't want to write books that provide people with that. I want books that challenge, anger, and possibly offend.’” 

Alexie’s characterizations are fascinatingly diverse.  In Blasphemy we meet “all species of warriors in America today," including obsessive basketball players (one of whom idolizes President Obama’s playing “style”), meth addicts, long-winded storytellers, homeless heroes, nomadic boxers, sex-crazed insomniacs, generous pawn brokers, deadbeat dads, responsible dads, faithful lovers, unfaithful lovers, gay Indians, and straight Indians—all struggling to find their way.

In a 1988 Indian Artist interview, Sherman Alexie described himself and his writing: "I write about the kind of Indian I am: kind of mixed up, kind of odd, not traditional. I'm a rez kid who's gone urban."

Alexie grew up “miserable” in an environment of poverty and alcoholism on a Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington.

Born hydrocephalic and not expected to live, Alexie underwent brain surgery at the age of six months.  Although he survived, Alexie had seizures all through childhood and was teased by other kids as “the Globe” because of his enlarged skull.  Reading became a way to ease his loneliness. He had read every book in the town’s public library by the time he was 12.

An honors student and star basketball team player and debater in high school, Alexie won a scholarship to Gonzaga University but dropped out because he didn’t fit in socially.  Later he enrolled at Washington State University, uncertain of what career to pursue.  On a whim he enrolled in a poetry workshop and read a poem that, for the first time, spoke to him as an Indian.  He explains:

“‘I’d never seen myself in a work of literature. I loved books, always, but I didn’t know Indians wrote books or poems. And then to see myself so fully understood in one line of a poem, as though that one line of a poem written by someone else was my autobiography ... It was like understanding human language for the first time. It was like hearing the first words ever spoken by a human being, and understanding for the first time the immense communicative power of language.

I had never intellectualized this feeling that I’d had my entire life. And then, to hear the thing aloud. To see it in print. These are the kind of emotions that nobody puts words to, at least not where I’m from. So an intellectual and emotional awakening were fused in this one line. They came together and slapped me upside the head.

I’d written stuff before, but it was always modeled after greeting cards or the standard suspects: Joyce Kilmer, a Keats poem. The classics that every high school kid reads. But as soon as I saw that poem, I knew I could write about myself—my emotional state, the narrative of my emotional life. When I wrote before, I was always wearing a mask—I always adopted a pose. I was always putting on a white guy mask. And all of a sudden, I could actually use my real face.’”

Although he graduated from college with no  job, ending back on the reservation with “no job, no money no hope,” Alexie kept banging out poems and short stories on a manual typewriter until he eventually made it to the front page of the New York Times Book Review.  Since then Alexie has been a prolific writer.  He has published award-winning novels, short stories, and poetry.  He is also a stand-up comedian, a songwriter, a screenwriter, and director. Alexie now lives in Seattle as an “urban Indian” with his wife and two children.