

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point, finds that epidemics come in many shapes and sizes.Ī conversation with Jerome Groopman, an acclaimed doctor, researcher, and writer whose new book offers a rare inside view of modern medicine. Susan Sontag - whose new novel, In America, has just been published - doesn't feel at home in New York, or anywhere else. George Saunders, whose new collection of short stories has just been published, may be the most talented goof-off writing fiction today.Įlizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, the authors of Suburban Nation, argue that the antidote to the insidious spread of sprawl is good old-fashioned town planning.Įdna O'Brien talks about her admiration for Joyce, the importance of myth, and how her new book, Wild Decembers - in which heartache is prefigured by a tractor - fits in with her own "inner gnaw" As in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, the stories in Alexie's new collection, The Toughest Indian in the World, blend irony and surreal situations adeptly, as when a white drifter holds up a pancake restaurant "demanding a dollar per customer and someone to love" and comes away with a young Spokane Indian man he nicknames "Salmon Boy," or when the actor John Wayne tells his children, "Oh sons, you're just engaging in some harmless gender play." Toughest Indian unsettles as much as it amuses.Īlexie recently spoke with Atlantic Unbound's Jessica Chapel. In addition to the several books of poetry he has published, Alexie has also produced two novels, Reservation Blues (1996) and Indian Killer (1998), and his first short-story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1994), inspired the well-received 1998 movie Smoke Signals, for which he wrote the screenplay.Īlexie's stories and poems explore the terrain of intimate relationships, contemporary American pop culture, and reservation life without falling into either sentimentality or cynicism.
Since the publication in 1992 of his first poetry collection, The Business of Fancydancing (which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, has made a name for himself as a prolific and deft writer of fiction as well as poetry. Sherman Alexie - poet, novelist, short-story writer, Native American - strikes out at the "eagle-feathers school of Native literature"
