Book description
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and the previously unpublished screenplay "Harold of Orange,"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." "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 Gerald Vizenor is Professor of
Native American Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
His recent Wesleyan books are Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel
(1997), Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (1994), The
Heirs of Columbus (1991), and Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories
(1991). His novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China won the 1990
American Book Award.
