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Overview
Author of The Heirs of Columbus, Hotline Healers, Interior Landscapes, Crossbloods, and numerous other works, Gerald Vizenor is one of the century's most important and prolific Native American writers. Drawing on the best work of an acclaimed career, Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader reveals the wide range of his imagination and the evolution of his central themes.This compelling collection includes not only selections from Vizenor's innovative fiction, but also poetry, autobiography, essays, journalism, and the previously unpublished screenplay "Harold of Orange," winner of the Film-in-the-Cities national screenwriting competition.
Whether focusing on Native American tricksters or legal and financial claims of tribal sovereignty, Vizenor continually underscores the diversities of modern traditions, the mixed ethnicity that characterizes those who claim Native American origin, and cultural permeability of an increasingly commercial, global world.
A. Robert Lee of the University of Kent at Canterbury, England, provides a lucid introduction to this writer whose "radically self-aware and contemporary satiric tricksterism . . . as easily invokes Jabes, Barthes, Lyotard, or Foucault as bear ceremonial, ghost dance, or dream-catcher."
Synopsis
A rich selection from the broad range of a prolific Native American writer's work.
Library Journal
Vizenor has long been a writer whose critical acclaim has surpassed his popularity. This anthology represents an attempt to bring this highly innovative author to a larger public. Lee (American literature, Univ. of Kene, Canterbury) has compiled a nice cross section of Vizenor's work. Sections from Vizenor's autobiography, Interior Landscapes (LJ 7/90), allow the author to introduce himself. Following are selections from his novels, including the award-winning Griever (Univ. of Minnesota, 1986) and The Heirs of Columbus (LJ 6/15/91). Essays, selected short stories, and a screenplay round out the collection. There's nothing new here, but Vizenor's remains a fresh voice to most of the reading public.-Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical and Community Coll., Ohio
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Vizenor is unquestionably one of the most radical American literary voices on the subject of racial identity and an ironist extraordinaire as a witness to the aftermath of Manifest Destiny." --Voice Literary Supplement"Perhaps no Native American writer has been more interested in the threat of colonialism than Gerald Vizenor, nor more difficult to pin down."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Vizenor reveals not only how Indians have staved off the tidal wave of assimilation but also how, through humor and persistence, they sometimes reverse the direction of cultural appropriation and, in the process, transform the alien values imposed on them."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Vizenor has stirred the literary world, not only with his range but with the excellence of his thought and the dry cutting edge of his insight."--San Francisco Review of Books