Works by
Sherman Alexie
(Writer)
[October 7, 1966 - ]

Books

Novels

• Flight (2007)
  The best-selling author of multiple award-winning books returns with his first novel in ten years, a powerful, fast and timely story of a troubled foster teenager — a boy who is not a “legal” Indian because he was never claimed by his father — who learns the true meaning of terror. About to commit a devastating act, the young man finds himself shot back through time on a shocking sojourn through moments of violence in American history. He resurfaces in the form of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, inhabits the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Big Horn, and then rides with an Indian tracker in the 19th Century before materializing as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. When finally, blessedly, our young warrior comes to rest again in his own contemporary body, he is mightily transformed by all he’s seen. This is Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant — making us laugh while breaking our hearts. Simultaneously wrenching and deeply humorous, wholly contemporary yet steeped in American history, Flight is irrepressible, fearless, and again, groundbreaking Alexie.

• Indian Killer (1996)
  Native American Sherman Alexie's new novel is a departure in tone from his lyrical and funny earlier work, which include The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Reservation Blues. The main character is an Indian serial killer who incites racial tension by murdering whites in retribution for his people's history. The killer leaves clear signs of his motives by scalping his victims, and leaving feathers as gestures of Indian defiance. The killer is a conflicted creation--raised by loving white parents, but twisted by loss of his identity as an Indian. Alexie layers the story with complications and ancillary characters, from a rabid talk show host, to vengeance seeking whites, to liberals who find their patronizing espousal of Indian causes no longer so easy.

• Reservation Blues (1995) -- Winner American Book Award
  In 1931, Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil, receiving legendary blues skills in return. He went on to record only twenty-nine songs before being murdered on August 16, 1938. In 1992, however, Johnson suddenly reappears on the Spokane Indian Reservation and meets Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the misfit storyteller of the Spokane Tribe. When Johnson passes his enchanted instrument to Thomas - lead singer of the rock-and-roll band Coyote Springs - a magical odyssey begins that will take the band from reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan.
  
  Sherman Alexie imaginatively mixes narrative, newspaper excerpts, songs, journal entries, visions, radio interviews, and dreams to explore the effects of Christianity on Native Americans in the late twentieth century. In addition, he examines the impact of cultural assimilation on the relationships between Indian women and Indian men. Reservation Blues is a painful, humorous, and ultimately redemptive symphony about God and indifference, faith and alcoholism, family and hunger, sex and death.

Poetry

• Dangerous Astronomy (2005)

• Il powwow della fine del mondo (2005)

• One Stick Song (2000)

• The Man Who Loves Salmon (1998)

• The Summer of Black Widows (1996)

• Water Flowing Home (1996)

• First Indian on the Moon (1993 )

• Old Shirts & New Skins (1993) with Elizabeth Woody, Illustrator
  Sherman Alexie's poetic power renders an honest and painful perception of contemporary Native American life. In this collection, Alexie, a poet of the Coeur d'Alene people, speaks for the spirit of Native American resistance, determination, and sovereignty, compelling readers to confront reality with his honest and inspiring vision. Remarkable in its candor and gracefully constructed, this collection of poems binds us to the present and, at the same time, connects us to the voices of the past.

• Seven Mourning Songs for the Cedar Flute I Have Yet to Learn to Play (1993)

• I Would Steal Horses (1993)

• The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems  (1991)

Screenplays

• Business of Fancydancing: Screenplay (2003)
  Sherman Alexie, director


DVD  VHS

• 49?
  Eric Frith, director

• Smoke Signals: A Screenplay (1998)
  Chris Eyre, director
  DVD  VHS

Short Stories

• Ten Little Indians (2003)
  Sherman Alexie is one of our most acclaimed and popular writers today. With Ten Little Indians, he offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heartrending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love. In Alexie's first story, "The Search Engine," Corliss is a rugged and resourceful student who finds in books the magic she was denied while growing up poor. In "The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above," an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her to the bewilderment of her only child. "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" starts off with a homeless man recognizing in a pawnshop window the fancy-dance regalia that were stolen fifty years earlier from his late grandmother. Even as they often make us laugh, Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candor that cut to the heart of the human experience, shedding brilliant light on what happens when we grow into and out of each other.

• The Toughest Indian in the World (2000)
  A beloved American writer whose books are championed by critics and readers alike, Sherman Alexie has been hailed by Time as "one of the better new novelists, Indian or otherwise." Now his acclaimed new collection, The Toughest Indian in the World, which received universal praise in hardcover, is available in paperback. In these stories, we meet the kind of American Indians we rarely see in literature -- the kind who pay their bills, hold down jobs, fall in and out of love. A Spokane Indian journalist transplanted from the reservation to the city picks up a hitchhiker, a Lummi boxer looking to take on the toughest Indian in the world. A Spokane son waits for his diabetic father to come home from the hospital, tossing out the Hershey Kisses the father has hidden all over the house. An estranged interracial couple, separated in the midst of a traffic accident, rediscover their love for each other. A white drifter holds up an International House of Pancakes, demanding a dollar per customer and someone to love, and emerges with $42 and an overweight Indian he dubs Salmon Boy. Sherman Alexie's voice is one of remarkable passion, and these stories are love stories -- between parents and children, white people and Indians, movie stars and ordinary people. Witty, tender, and fierce, The Toughest Indian in the World is a virtuoso performance by one of the country's finest writers.

• The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)
  When it was first published in 1993, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven established Sherman Alexie as a stunning new talent of American letters. The basis for the award-winning movie Smoke Signals, it remains one of his most beloved and widely praised books. In this darkly comic collection, Alexie 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. 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, most poetically, modern Indians and the traditions of the past.

Young Adults

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) with art by Ellen Forney
  In his first book for young adults, bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by acclaimed artist Ellen Forney, that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

Music

• Smoke Signals: Music from the Miramax Motion Picture (1998)

• Honor:  A Benefit for the Honor the Earth Campaign (1996)

• Talking Rain: Spoken Word & Music from the Pacific Northwest (1995)

• Reservation Blues: The Soundtrack (1995)

• Roadkillbasa (1994)

• Jack Hammer Lobotomy (1991)

• The Business of Fancydancing - Music From the Movie (Date?)

• Will Work For Peace: New Political Poems (Date?), Brett Axel, ed.
  Multi-cultural, cross-generational anthology of new political poetry of 144 living poets from every continent on Earth.
  
  Includes work by Alix Olson, Amy Ouzoonian, Bill Zavatsky, Bob Holman, Carolyn Kizer, Charles Fishman, Charles Potts, Cid Corman, Colette Inez, Cristin Aptowicz, Daniela Gioseffi, David Ray, Dean Blehert, Diane di Prima, Donald Hall, Edwin Torres, Elaine Equi, Ellen Bass, Francis Driscoll, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez,  Janet Hamill, Lamont Steptoe, Leslea Newman, Lyn Lifshin, Marge Piercy, Marilyn Chin, Martin Espada, Maude Meehan, Maxine Chernoff, Michael Cadnum, Nicole Blackman, Peter Viereck, Regie Cabico, Roger Bonair-Agard, Sarah Jones, Sherman Alexie, Susan Griffin, Taylor Mali, Thaddeaus Rutkowski, and W. D. Snodgrass

• Understanding Sherman Alexie (2005) by Daniel Grassian
  In this first book-length examination of Native American poet, novelist, filmmaker, and short story writer Sherman Alexie, Daniel Grassian offers a comprehensive look at a writer immersed in traditional Native American, as well as mainstream American, culture. Grassian takes readers through Alexie’s career, from his first collections of poetry, The Business of Fancydancing and Old Shirts and New Skins, through such novels as Reservation Blues and Indian Killer, to the recent short story collection Ten Little Indians. Grassian suggests that Alexie’s oeuvre reflects his primary artistic challenge: how to write about Indians in a predominantly televisual country that distorts and complicates the importance and nature of ethnicity itself.
  
  Drawing comparisons with such established Native American writers as N. Scott Momaday and James Welch as well as with Generation X peers, Grassian presents Alexie’s work as equally informed by Native American culture and generic, mainstream influences. He demonstrates how Alexie utilizes popular culture and connects it to the lives of Native Americans as his art transforms the conventional tools of cultural colonization into a means of Native American empowerment.
  
  Grassian explores Alexie’s ability to counteract lingering stereotypes of Native Americans, his challenges to the dominant American history, and his suspicion of the New Age movement. The picture of Alexie that emerges from Grassian’s text is one of a writer who is fiercely talented, intelligent, witty, and honest, a writer committed to helping readers understand contemporary Native American lives, even if his work sometimes portrays both Native Americans and non-Natives in an unfavorable light.