Synopsis
In his first new fiction since winning the National Book Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, best-selling author Sherman Alexie delivers a virtuoso collection of tender, witty, and soulful stories that expertly capture modern relationships from the most diverse angles. War Dances brims with Alexie’s poetic and revolutionary prose, and reminds us once again why he ranks as one of our country’s finest writers.
With bright insight into the minds of artists, entrepreneurs, fathers, husbands, and sons, Alexie populates his stories with average men on the brink of exceptional change: In the title story, a son recalls his father’s “natural Indian death” from alcohol and diabetes, just as he learns that he himself may have a brain tumor; “The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless,” dissects a vintage clothing store owner’s failing marriage and courtship of a Puma-clad stranger in airports across the country; and “Breaking and Entering” recounts a film editor’s fateful confrontation with an thieving adolescent.
Brazen and wise War Dances takes us to the heart of what it means to be human. The new beginnings, successes, mistakes, and regrets that make up our daily lives are laid bare in this wide-ranging new work that is quintessential
The Barnes & Noble Review
I find it nearly impossible to dislike a Sherman Alexie story, or novel, or poem, or whatever he writes. And in the last15 or so years he has written quite a bit, a whole suitcase of books (four novels, three collections of short stories, and a dozen books of poems) -- checked luggage, not carry-on.
War Dances, which the writer and his publisher have refused to categorize, comes across mostly like a story collection: there are five longer stories, about a half dozen shorter fictions, and twice that number of poems. I know little of the writer's biography, other than that he's Native American from the Pacific Northwest, but a number of the stories seem to me to scream out from the rowdy autobiographical seats in the fiction stadium. Not that it matters: Alexie writes with equal insight about a privileged white ne'er-do-well senator's son and a Native American watching his father die slowly.