“It is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope.” 

“Imitation” (p. 26)

“The Thing Around Your Neck” is the most impressive story in this collection.  As a reader of this story, “you” become a young Nigerian woman whose friends and family envied you for winning the American visa lottery.  But the United States you discover is not one to envy. After your American uncle sexually assaults you, you leave his house and only have enough money to rent a tiny room with a stained carpet. “The thing around your neck” that your uncle inflicted upon you continues to haunt you, especially at night. 

Your job as a waitress doesn’t pay enough for you to buy these things so you feel too ashamed to write to anyone.  Your dream of going to a community college is dashed so you go to the library and read some of the books.  You want to write your friends and family about the rich Americans who are thin and the poor Americans who are fat; about the Americans who guess you are African and  tell you they love elephants and want to go on a safari; about how you often feel invisible; about how you often sit on your lumpy mattress and think about home. 

When you do finally write, you discover your father died five months ago. You curl up in bed and wonder what trivial thing you were doing in this strange country on the day he died.  You buy an airline ticket to go home to see your family and it is for one way. 

Adichie’s writing style is engaging and straightforward.  She has the wonderful ability to draw readers inside the minds of her characters, especially immigrants, and see the United States through a new lens, the way these often culture-shocked, intimidated women do when they first arrive.  In this passage, the narrator of “The Arrangers of Marriage” describes her first visit to a mall food court:

We ate the pizza sitting at a small round table in what he called a “food court.”  A sea of people sitting around circular tables, hunched over paper plates of greasy food.  Uncle Ike would be horrified at the thought of eating here; he was a titled man and did not even eat at weddings unless he was served in a private room.  There was something humiliatingly public, something lacking in dignity, about this place, this open space of too many tables and too much food. (p. 176)  

Adichie is also very skilled at writing simple but compelling story beginnings that entice readers to keep reading.  In addition to the excellent opening of the title story, here are two others I especially liked:

Here is the opening paragraph of “Imitation”:

Nkem is staring the bulging, slanted eyes of the Benin mask on the living room mantel as she learns about her husband’s girlfriend.  (p. 22)

And the first two sentences of “A Private Experience”:

Chika climbs in through the store window first and then holds the shutter as the woman climbs in after her.  The store looks as if it was deserted long before the riots started…. (p. 43)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an award-winning Nigerian writer who divides her time between living in Nigeria and the United States. Adichie says she “didn't ever consciously decide to pursue writing. I've been writing since I was old enough to spell, and just sitting down and writing made me feel incredibly fulfilled.”  Around the age of seven, Adichie said,  “I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.”

It was not until Adichie was ten years old when she read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that she began to realize that “‘people who looked like me could live in books.’ She has been writing about Africa ever since.” By the time she was 21 years old, Adichie had published a collection of poems and a play.  She studied in both Nigeria and the United States, earning masters degrees in creative writing and African studies. 

Her two novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), are both set in Nigeria and won several awards.  Her most recent novel, Americanah, (2013), which explores issues or race, identify, and love in post 9/11 Nigeria and the United States, has also won awards.  The Thing Around Your Neck is her first collection of short stories.

"This book is a fine one to read when you feel yourself wondering what would happen if you chucked it all, took off, went north to someplace where you’d have to deal with the loud sound of your own heart.”

--Manoa




Survival: Stories is Nancy Lord’s second collection of short stories, many of which were written while Lord was enrolled in Vermont College’s MFA writing program.  The collection was the second-place finalist in the 1986 AWP (Associated Writing Programs) short fiction contest and a finalist in the 1988 Flannery O’Connor short fiction contest.

Alaska is the overarching character that dominates this impressive collection.  Our largest, coldest most remote, and most pristine state “looms as a presence that variously is vast and claustrophobic, dangerous and freeing, exhilarating and depressing,” according to a Google review.  All of the characters are in varied ways attempting to endure the challenges of living in Alaska.   Some survive while others do not.

Many of the characters in these 15 stories are similar to the narrator of “Small Potatoes” in their attraction to Alaska, contemporary pioneers who find it comforting that “there is still so much unfenced and untrammeled space.” 

She explains:

Even as a little girl in Boston, I was looking for this. The day I learned about the Westward Movement—settlers trundling along in covered wagons, as it was presented—I raced around after school, dunk with the concept of first steps into unknown territory, stamping my feel into any unblemished patch of snow, shouting, “Pioneer! Pioneer! Pioneer!”

When I came to Alaska, it was with the sure knowledge that here were places that, truly, no one had stepped.  And it mattered, the sense of putting a foot down and knowing I was the first to look upon the world from exactly that vantage point.  Every night—of mountain or mouse hole—was a discovery.  (p. 113)

The idealistic and somewhat naïve newcomer in the title story explains her migration to Alaska to the narrator, her co-worker, when she first arrives: “I need to be here,” Bonnie confesses.  “I need to be somewhere that hasn’t been paved over yet…” (p. 5), a place where nothing is easy but everything seems necessary. (p.10).   The narrator futile hopes that Bonnie’s “purity of vision” will sustain her through the inevitable challenges of Alaskan survival. (p.6)

The protagonist of “Marks” who migrated to Alaska with a friend who was later murdered thinks back without regret for what has happened, “Anyone could live comfortably in a settled place—but what kind of life was that for the two of them? Neither of them had fled the safe, well-traveled streets of their hometown just to shy away from what they found in this new and boundless land.” (p.44)  

The female dog musher in ”The Lady with the Sled Dog” describes trekking over the frozen landscape as a kind of religious experience:

And they you’ve got the country, as big and empty as anywhere in the world. At night, when the mountains are lit by the moon and stars, and it’s about thirty degrees below normal and maybe a few northern lights are twisting away in the sky….it gets you right here. (p. 50)

Although many people have felt the lure of Alaska and taken the risk to try to survive there, one of the characters in “Snowblind” explains that Alaskan’s importance extends even to those who have never set foot in the state. “Some of us need Alaska, even if it’s only in our minds,” Eric says. “You know, even if we’re not there, we need Alaska to be there.” (p. 145)

Whereas some characters who migrate to Alaska acclimate to its harshness and thrive there, others do not.  The husband and wife in “Waiting for the Thaw” are good examples.  The father views life in Alaska as a continuing adventure, praising the joys of trapping to his five-year-old son:

This is the life, ain’t it?  It’s a sin a person can have it so good, walkin’ around in the woods all day long, just listenin’ and lookin’ at God’s earth the way he made it, not all messed up the way it is everywhere else.”  (p. 99)

Winter is so cold in Alaska “it’s as though sound itself is frozen.” Ben’s father loves the peaceful quietness. “It’s kind of life everything stops,” he tells Ben. (p. 101)  But winter finds Ben’s mother hibernating under the covers, deep in depression. Unable get out of bed, she tells Ben her dream:  “‘It was sunny. I was eating something like pineapple. The juice was trickling down my chin, making me sticky.  I think it was Hawaii.’”  (pp. 103-104)  While she sleeps, Ben entertains himself by looking at magazines but notices all the women are smiling, which his mother rarely does.

Similarly, the divorced father in “Nature’s Lessons” is in his awe of the beauty of Alaska. “It was so wild—all the mountains and gorges, forests and brush, rivers foaming, waterfalls cascading into pools.” (p. 112)  But his ten-year-old daughter visiting from Los Angeles doesn’t share his enthusiasm for the wild where the bathroom is outdoors and you can’t hop in your car and head to the grocery story anytime you want like “regular people” do.  “This is another kind of life,” he explains, “where we do things for ourselves.”  (p. 116)

Although she hikes, fishes, pulls weeds, and picks berries with her father without complaint, Mary reminds her father of a prisoner or hospital patient “who did the best they could while waiting for their day of release” (p. 120)   As she and her father munch on homemade pizza made with moosemeat one evening, Mary lists all the foods she can’t wait to eat when she gets back into "civilization" and makes her father promise to buy her a double scoop ice cream cone.

The title story is the strongest one in this collection, beginning with these riveting opening sentences:

            They say she must have been crazy.

            Suicidal, they say.

            Self-destructive.

            Absolutely nuts.

            They shake their heads, in sadness and in wonder.  (p. 1)

“She” is the most recent cannery worker to join the fish processing line.  Bonnie reminds the narrator of herself 18 years ago when she migrated from Minnesota to Alaska, guided by a “purity of vision” similar to Bonnie’s.  Now she laments the fact that she has gradually lost the idealism that led her to the last frontier.  “At her age,” she remembers, “I’d been so full of dreams.  Alaska, the summer I discovered it, was all I wanted it to be: a land of light and flowers and adventure.  I was going to climb every mountain, pick berries beside every bear, raft every river, drink whiskey with every old sourdough.  It was like being in love; everything was possible.” (p. 4)

But gradually over time, the narrator admits, “the part of me that had been so ready for adventure, so accepting of hardship, so enthralled with what was new and simple and natural had become less read, less accepting, less enthralled. It hadn’t been anything specific, any event that had changed me.  It had just happened, a process, the same sort of dimming adjustment my eyes had made to the glaciers’ blue ice after I’d seen it enough times.” (p.22)

So when Bonnie’s dream to live in an island wilderness alone  to “be a part of nature” ends in her failure to survive the first winter in her adopted homeland, the narrator feels grief at the loss of a young life and guilt that perhaps she could have done more to alter Bonnie’s unrealistic expectations of living off the land in such an unforgiving place. But the overriding and unanticipated feeling she confesses at the end of the story is one of regret that during her 18 years in Alaska she was not more of an romantic risk taker, like Bonnie.  The narrator admits that “in my life, when I might have sought more, I settled, increasing, for what was safer, and less.” (p. 22)   In mourning for Bonnie, she realizes the heavy price she has paid for her own survival.

Nancy Lord is a wonderful storyteller whose short fiction demonstrates her ability to weave descriptions, characterizations, and plots together in a way that captures both the majestic and the sinister sides of Alaska and the intriguing individuals who find their way there in an attempt to “escape from a world that is closing in too tightly.” 

Nancy Lord’s writings, including fiction, nonfiction, and memoir, illustrates a deep connection to the Alaskan landscape and culture she calls home.  Her writings draw upon her many years as a commercial salmon fisherman, and later, naturalist and historian on cruise ships.  She served as Alaska’s Writer Laureate from 2008-2010.  A resident of Homer since 1973, Lord teaches part time Kachemak Bay Campus of the University of Alaska and in the low-residency M.F.A. program at the University of Alaska Anchorage.  She is also actively involved in conservation and community-building causes. 

After loving Christina Henriquez’s novel, The Book of Unknown Americans (Knopf, 2014), I was thrilled to discover her short story collection, Come Together, Fall Apart (2006).

The novella and eight short stories in this collection take place in Panama during the late 1980s when the country was experiencing unrest and instability under the rule and American-led overthrow of Manuel Noriega. 

Henriquez’s characters, ranging from adolescents to the elderly, are everyday Panamanians who remain intensely human in their relationships and family conflicts even as uncertain change threatens life as they know it.  They experience love, rejection, commitment, infidelity, closeness, estrangement, divorce, abuse, solitude, and grief--all against a backdrop of a country in turmoil where revolutionaries sell weapons on the street, looters take advantage of the opportunity to steal, and car bombs explode intermittently.

The Panama of the late 1980s rises to character status in these stories, as the country become a war zone and experiences a revolution that will forever change its people and its future. 


“We were all scared in those days,” Ramon, the adolescent narrator of  “Come Together, Fall Apart” begins the novella. “Noriega was on his way to collapse and already the chaos had started.” (p.199).  During this turbulent time in his life and his country, Ramon experiences young love and rejection; displacement from his childhood home; loss of his father, who chooses to end his life rather than be uprooted; and ostracism of his mother by other family members, who blame her for failing to prevent her husband’s suicide.

When Panama officially declares war, Ramon describes his feelings and undoubtedly those of many Panamanians:

“Before that, every moment had felt like waiting. As though we were all, as a country, teetering on the edge of a cliff.  We were peering down; we were holding our breath. We were on the brink of something, but we were waiting for some signal, some gust of wind to push us forward, to catapult us into action, into change. It came then. And we all, I think, wanted to believe that whether we jumped or fell, there would be something there to catch us, that things would be better once it was over.”  (p. 243)

Henriquez explores male-female relationships in several stories.  I knew I would like “Yanina” as soon as I read the first sentence:  “Yanina has asked me to marry her forty-five times.”  The story, whose protagonist is reluctant to make commitment, ends romantically with his proposal to her etched in sand.  In “Chasing Birds” an American couple travel to Panama to find exotic birds but the romantic adventure envisioned by the wife doesn’t happen.  It takes a desperate act on her part to divert his attention from a white-collared swift. 

The adolescent girl in “Wide Pale Ocean” is torn between the closeness she has always felt for her mother and her newfound interest in a teenage boy.  And in “Come Together, Fall Apart” Ramon has to face the painful truth that the adolescent girl he adores prefers his best friend. 

Family relationships are also at the heart of many of these stories.  As her own parents “who speak the same language but cannot understand each other” are seeking a divorce, the young American girl in “Mercury” crawls in bed with her Panamanian grandparents, seeking a closer connection in a way where words are unnecessary (p. 112). 

In “Drive” the protagonist describes her feelings when she is out walking on night and sees her estranged father sitting on a bench:

“It’s the strangest feeling whenever I see him—like seeing the love of your life the one who left you, when you’re just out doing errands, trying to keep up with the business of the everyday. You half want to run and jump on them and bury your face in their neck and hold on forever and you half want to turn away, shielding yourself.”  As her father pleads with her for money, she realizes “we’re staring at each other under the moon but to him I’m just anybody.”  (p. 70).

The young daughter in “Beautiful” who feels so lucky to “have two parents to kiss me good night” when her estranged father returns home becomes frightened and deeply confused when she discovers he is a child abuser.  The estrangement of the daughter in “Wide Pale Ocean” from her father, whom she has never met (“His name was Ronaldo and he was better at the merengue than the tango, but that was all I knew.” (p. 156)), fosters a very close bond with her mother that becomes threatened when she reaches adolescence and starts to discover boys.

The family relationship in “Come Together, Fall Apart” begins to “crumble” just like buildings all over Panama during the American invasion when the father  makes the decision to stay in his home as it is being demolished rather than be displaced.  Although his wife reluctantly honors his request, other family members blame her for not preventing his suicide.

The best story in this excellent collection is “Beautiful.”  It includes one of the most graphic descriptions of child abuse I have ever read, made more poignant and intensely personal because it is written from perspective of the eight-year-old narrator whose estranged father is her abuser.  The father she feels so lucky to have at home once more (who coincidentally returns for an indeterminate length of time when his brother wins the lottery) becomes the person she must flee:

“Something swells inside me, something hateful and thick and hurtful and sad, and at that moment more than anything else in the world I want to get as far away from him as I can.  I want to sink to the middle of the earth, I want to float out to the middle of the ocean.” (p. 124)

Equally powerful is this young narrator’s ability to overcome this horrendous experience by cutting off the hair that her father pulled so hard to hold her down she could feel it breaking from her scalp.

“And before I know it, I am standing, with the door locked, in the bathroom, up on the wooden step stool, looking in the small, wavy mirror. I am cutting it all off, as close to the roots as I can get and promising myself that he will never never never again be able to hold me like that.  I cut the millions of rivers of hair until it’s all dried up and washed out and can be filled with nothing but wind.  Little by little, I feel the fire cool.” (p. 125)

Even though the narrator’s mother is angered that her daughter has “ruined” her hair and her father asks quietly, “‘Who did this to you?’”, no one can take away the daughter’s feeling of confidence that she is “more beautiful than ever,” protected by the wall she has built around herself that her father can never again penetrate (p. 128)

Henriquez’s writing style is simple but graceful, full of empathy and humanity for the characters she imagines.  Her writing is full of wonderful analogies. Here are some examples:

from “Drive”

“Most memories might be like water, but some are like wood—solidly there that you can feel them and smell them and wrap your hands around them, and for a hundred years they will never go away.” (p. 65)

from “Beautiful:

“I am a caterpillar and a butterfly at the same time—unsure of the attention, wanting to stay hidden, but also feeling like I’ve broken into a new life where I am more glittering and confident and have left the other one behind.” (p. 121) 

From “The Box House and the Snow”

“Then, all at once, millions of snowflakes burst from the murky sky and fluttered to the earth.  It was a pillow ripping open.  It was a silent, exploding firework. It was as if God had been collecting mounds and fistfuls and armfuls of snow for centuries, and finally, could hold the white flakes no more. He tore a seam in the fabric of heaven and sent the snowflakes scampering forth.” (p. 181)

Henriquez also ends her stories with powerful images:  a marriage proposal written in the sand with a stick (“Yanina”); a daughter sitting on the rocks overlooking a bay holding her mother’s cremation urn, “letting my fingertips graze the dust” (“Ashes”);  a woman who has just miscarried realizing that “nothing is ever really lost.  Even if you can’t find it, even if you can’t hold it in your thin, tired arms, it’s always somewhere.” (“Drive,” pp. 81-82); a mother and daughter floating in the water “lost to everything but each other.” (“The Wide, Pale Ocean,” p. 177);  and a granddaughter whose parents are divorcing crawling in bed between her grandparents in search of connection (“Mercury”).

Henriquez has achieved much acclaim in her young writing career.  She is the author of two novels as well as this collection. Her short stories have appeared in several journals, including the New Yorker.  


Henriquez earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her father is a native of Panama who immigrated to the United States in 1971.  Similar to the young protagonist in “Mercury,” Henriquez visited her grandparents in Panama every summer as she was growing up.

“I would hope that my readers feel a sense of awe at the quality of human endurance, at the endurance of love in the face of a variety of difficulties; that the quotidian life is not always easy, and is something worthy of respect. I would also hope that readers receive a larger understanding, or a different understanding, of what it means to be human, than they might have had before.  I would like the reader to feel that we are all, more or less, in a similar state as we love and disappoint one another, and that we try, most of us, as best we can, and that to fail and succeed is what we do.” (pp. 281-282)

Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, Olive Kitteridge is a collection of 13 interconnected stories that “present a heart-wrenching, penetrating portrait of ordinary coastal Mainers living lives of quiet grief intermingled with flashes of human connection.”

Although close to 100 characters living in the fictional coastal town of Crosby, Maine are introduced in the collection, it is Olive Kitteridge—a wife, mother, retired math teacher, and lifelong resident of Crosby—who is the dominant character.  She makes an appearance in each of the 13 stories.  Olive is the central figure as well as narrator of several stories while she is only casually mentioned in others.  Her husband, Henry, and only son, Christopher, also appear in several stories.

Olive is not a very likeable character but is a very human one.  She is a large, imposing woman who is opinionated, irritable, impatient, often trite and judgmental, insecure and vulnerable, and emotionally distant.  Olive seems to prefer planting tulips to being with people.  “She didn’t like to be alone.  Even more, she didn’t like being with people.” (p. 148)   

We immediately loathe Olive as we meet her in the first story, “The Pharmacy.”  Although her husband, Henry, wants to put his arms around her when he comes home from work, he refrains because “she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.” (p. 6)  Henry is a kind and gentle man who remains a devoted husband, even when he is demeaned and ignored, which is often.  He searches for happiness elsewhere—in his pharmacy business and friendship with a young woman whom he hires and befriends, which makes Olive even more irritated.    

Barnes and Noble Reviewer David Abrams describes Olive as “the kind of woman you would duck across the street to avoid meeting. She's abrasive as sandpaper rubbed across a scab and unapologetically rude...To her genial, affable husband, she's a cross he silently bears with a forgiving smile. To her son, she can be a tyrannizing terror -- so much so, that as an adult Christopher can only break free of her maternal force-field by moving as far away as the continent will allow: to California.”

Elizabeth Strout says that Olive was the easiest character in the collection to create.  “She is so vibrant, so powerful in her desires and opinions,” she says (p. 275).  Strout describes Olive as “ferocious and complicated and kindly and sometimes cruel.” In essence, she is “a little bit of each of us.” (p. 276) 

When asked about how other characters in Crosby perceive Olive, Strout replies: “I think Olive is partially aware of how people in town perceive her.  But there are different perceptions of her, remember. To some, she is insightful and likeable.  To others she is bossy and contentious.  I think to some extent she believes that she doesn’t care what people think of her, but I also think that she does care…What she is, like most of us, blind to aspects of herself, she does not shy away from things she begins to perceive about herself; she is willing to strive after the truth.” (p. 281)

In one memorable scene, Olive retreats to her son and daughter-in-law’s bedroom on their wedding day in “The Little Burst.”  Jealous of her new daughter-in-law because she seems so overconfident, Olive decides to teach her a lesson in humility.  Rummaging through Suzanne’s closet, Olive steals a bra and one shoe and smears black Magic Marker on the sleeve of a sweater.  Olive is pleased with herself:

“The sweater will be ruined, and the shoe will be gone, along with the bra, covered by used Kleenex and old sanitary napkins in the bathroom trash of Dunkin’ Donuts, and then squashed into a dumpster the next day.  As a matter of fact, there is no reason, if Dr. Sue is going to live near Olive that Olive can’t occasionally take a little of this, a little of that—just to keep the self-doubt alive.  Give herself a little burst.  Because Christopher doesn’t need to be living with a woman who thinks she knows everything.”  (p. 74)

In another powerful scene that ends the story “Security,” Olive abruptly announces she is cutting short her visit with her son’s family in New York house following an argument.  At the airport, still angry at her “cruel” son and daughter-in-law and flustered by the security procedure, she refuses to take off her shoes, telling the security official, “I will not take off my shoes. I don’t give a damn if the plane blows up, do you understand?  I don’t give one good goddamn if any of you are blown sky-high” before she is quietly escorted away.  (p. 232)

We see a more compassionate Olive in “Starving” when she tries to comfort a young woman with anorexia and in “Incoming Tide” when she consoles a former student who is contemplating suicide.  When Henry has a stroke and lives in a vegetative state in a nursing home, Olive visits daily and calls to talk, even though it is a one-sided conversation.  Trying to follow Henry’s model of caring, she visits a recent widow in “Basket of Trips” but can’t bring herself to touch the woman.

Olive is on the verge of becoming likeable as a widow at the age of 74 in the collection’s last story, “The River,” during which she acknowledges her regrets in not being a more loving wife, takes responsibility for alienating her son, and realizes her capacity to begin to love again.

The characters in this collection, ranging from adolescents to aged, cope with change, depression, death, loneliness, relationship issues and family conflicts—the stuff of everyday life in which we recognize ourselves and others.

Some reviewers consider Olive Kitteridge a novel. Unlike chapters in a novel, however, that build upon one another as the novel progresses, all of the stories in the collection are self-contained. Their only links are the setting in Crosby, Maine and the presence of Olive, and occasionally, her husband and son.  Each story could be a seed for the beginning of a different novel.  Most of the characters, except Olive and Henry, only make one appearance, limiting the development you would expect in a novel. 

I believe Olive Kitteridge would be a stronger collection if Olive had played a larger role in each of the stories. Although each of the stories in which she plays a major role add more pieces to the puzzle of her development, her character is never really complete. At the end of the collection there are still missing pieces that leave an incomplete picture of the evolution of this frustrating but fascinating woman. The weaker stories are clearly those where we see Olive at a distance or only hear her name mentioned.

The bookend stories of this collection are the strongest, I believe, and my favorites. 

“The Pharmacy” introduces Olive and Henry—a study in contrasts.  Olive’s flaws are illustrated in vivid contrast to the virtues of her husband, and we despite her as much as we like him.   “Oh, for God’s sake, Henry,” she often says in exasperation at something he’s done to irritate her.

Reviewer Abrams points out that it was a “bold move” for Strout to introduce the collection’s major character as a thoroughly unlikeable one in the collection’s first story, risking offending readers who might put the book down after reading “Pharmacy,” not wishing to know any more about Olive.

But like her or not, we find Olive intriguing enough to keep reading.  As NPR Reviewer Melissa Bank writes, “Olive is a character who's as bad as you'd be if you let yourself — and that's partly what drives the book: You can't wait to see what she's going to do next.”

“The River” is an equally strong story, ending the collection with a more positive portrayal of Olive.   A mellower widow at this stage in her life, Olive is “drowning in the emptiness” of her life and hoping for a quick death.  (p. 257) When she begins a casual relationship with a man she had written off before as a rich snob, Olive is caught between longing for him and wanting to criticize him. “He’s afraid to be alone, she thought.  He’s weak.  Men were. Probably wants somebody to cook his meals, pick up after him. In which case, he was barking up the wrong tree.  He spoke of his mother with such frequency, and in such glowing terms—something had to be wrong there.  If he wanted a mother, he’d better go looking elsewhere.” (p. 262) And worst of all, he’s a Republican who voted for George W. Bush!

But desire and the need to be loved win over politics and other character flaws.

“They were here and her body—old, big, sagging—felt straight-out desire for his. That she had not loved Henry this way for many years before he died saddened her enough to make her close her eyes…

And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter?  He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either.  But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union-what pieces like took out of you.” (pp. 269-270)

Instead of wishing for a “quick death” as she once did to end her widowed loneliness, Olive realizes that although the world “baffles” her, she “did not want to leave it yet." (270)

Elizabeth Strout is a natural storyteller with a clear, clean style and a keen eye for observation and detail, especially for the ordinary things in life that are often overlooked.  She portrays the human condition with sensitive insight, empathy, and splashes of humor.   

Comparing Olive Kitteridge to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, San Francisco Chronicle Reviewer Ann Cummins finds that the collection succeeds because “the characters are so human, the place so vivid.” 

Elizabeth Strout is an award-winning novelist and short story writer.  She grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. She began writing down thoughts in notebooks during childhood and spent many hours at the local library.  She also spent much of her childhood outdoors, developing a love for the beauty around her.

But Strout’s childhood was also a very isolated one.  Her parents allowed no television, no newspapers, no parties, no dates, and no hanging out with friends. 

Strout’s mother, a high school teacher, encouraged her daughter to write.  By the age of 16, Strout was sending stories to magazines.  Strout credits her mother as being an inspiration for her writing because her mother was a wonderful storyteller. She explains:

“I would listen, as a child, when some friend of hers came to visit, and they would gossip about the different people they knew. My mother had the most fascinating stories about people's families, murderers, mental illnesses, babies abandoned, and she delivered it all in a matter-of-fact way that was terribly compelling. It made me believe that there was nothing more interesting than the lives of people, their real hidden lives, and this of course can lead one down the path of becoming a fiction writer.”

In college Strout would sit at the lunch counter of Woolworth’s and listen to people’s conversations.  “I still love to eavesdrop,” she says, "but mostly I like the idea of being around people who are right in the middle of their lives, revealing certain details to each other — leaving the rest for me to make up.” 

Now that “tragically” the Woolworth’s counters are gone, Strout has turned to cell phone conversations for inspiration.  Overhearing “half a conversation,” she says, can provide the germ of a story.

Riding the subway can also provide inspiration. “A number of my characters I have visually been able to take back to my work table from the subway,” says Strout.  “It’s not that they were doing anything, but something in their physicality made me say ‘there she is.’”

Strout earned a degree in law from the Syracuse University College of Law and a Certificate of Gerontology from the Syracuse School of Social Work.  She has taught creative writing at Colgate University and Queens University of Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

“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.