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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selections from Vizenor's innovative fiction, but also poetry, autobiography, essays, journalism, and the previously unpublished screenplay "Harold of Orange," winner of the Film-in-the-Cities national screenwriting competition.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 Jabés, Barthes, Lyotard, or Foucault as bear ceremonial, ghost dance, or dream-catcher."
"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
"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
"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 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
"[Vizenor's] paradoxical achievement has been to garner a reputation as an innovative avant-garde writer by embracing, and revitalizing, ancient oral storytelling traditions." -- Chronicle of Higher Education
About the author
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.
