Leslie Marmon Silko Books

Storyteller blends original short stories and poetry influenced by the traditional oral tales that Leslie Marmon Silko heard growing up on the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico with autobiographical passages, folktales, family memories, and photographs. As she mixes traditional and Western literary genres, Silko examines themes of memory, alienation, power, and identity; communicates Native American notions regarding time, nature, and spirituality; and explores how stories and storytelling shape people and communities. Storyteller illustrates how one can frame collective cultural identity in contemporary literary forms, as well as illuminates the importance of myth, oral tradition, and ritual in Silko's own work.

“To read this book is to hear the voices of the ancestors and spirits telling us where we came from, who we are, and where we must go.” —Maxine Hong KingstonIn its extraordinary range of character and culture, Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale. The acclaimed author of Ceremony has undertaken a weaving of ideas and lives, fate and history, passion and conquest in an attempt to re-create the moral history of the Americas, told from the point of view of the conquered, not the conquerors.

Focuses on the lives of young indian veterans home from the war, including Taya, a halfbred whose imprisonment by the Japanese has left him shattered. This novel follows his struggle against alcoholism and despair and his ritual search for meaning in the ancient Indian stories and traditions.