The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

by Alexie, Sherman

• ISBN13: 9780060976248
• ISBN10: 0060976241
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-09-01
• Publisher: Harpercollins

Summary

In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-two interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents hoping that the alcohol seeping through their skins might help him sleep, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who tells his stories long after people stop listening, and Jimmy Many Horses, dying of cancer, who writes letters on stationary that reads "From the Death Bed of Jimmy Many Horses III," even though he actually writes then on his kitchen table. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and mostly poetically between modern Indians and the traditions of the past.

Table of Contents

Every Little Hurricane	1	(11)
A Drug Called Tradition	12	(12)
Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ``The Star-Spangled Banner'' at Woodstock	24	(13)
Crazy Horse Dreams	37	(6)
The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Red Anymore	43	(11)
Amusements	54	(5)
This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona	59	(17)
The Fun House	76	(7)
All I Wanted to Do Was Dance	83	(10)
The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire	93	(11)
Distances	104	(6)
Jesus Christ's Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation	110	(20)
A Train is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result	130	(9)
A Good Story	139	(6)
The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue	145	(4)
Imagining the Reservation	149	(5)
The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor	154	(17)
Indian Education	171	(10)
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven	181	(10)
Family Portrait	191	(8)
Somebody Kept Saying Powwow	199	(12)
Witnesses, Secret and Not	211