Leslie Marmon Silko

In Winged Words Laura Coltelli interviews some of America's foremost Indian poets and novelists, including Paula Gunn Allen, Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, and others. They candidly discuss the debt to old and the creation of new traditions, the proprieties of age and gender, and the relations between Indian writers and non-Indian readers and critics, and between writers and anthropologists and historians.

An exciting study of novels by ten women writers who have combined the traditions of Romance and Realism to offer a more comprehensive view of contemporary life.

From warrior women to female deities who control the cycle of live, female characters in Native American literature exhibit a social and spiritual empowerment that is quite different from the average Pocahontas or squaw we are used to seeing in mainstream literature. This work argues that a tribal construct of gender relations, where the relationship between male and female roles is complementary rather than hierarchical, accounts for the existence of these empowered female characters in Native American literature. Focusing on the work of four of the twentieth century's most famous Native American authors, Zitkala-Sa, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdich and Sherman Alexie, Hollrah suggests that is important to evaluate Native American literary female characters in a cultural paradigm that is less Euro-American and more compatible to the complementary of Native American culture.

Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death's relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through "the space of death" gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide.

Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other "minorities" in society is, like death, "almost unspeakable". She gives voice to -- or raises -- the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.

Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.

Interpreting five contemporary novels that document suppressed histories of violence and abuse, including Toni Morrison's Beloved and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, the author then examines the disturbing connections between violence and art.

This study of the Native American in the western, romance, detective, horror, and science fiction genres examines how even historically accurate representations distort and bias the Native American figure to fit European-based traditions and modern agendas. The authors provide critical approaches for evaluating the literature. They argue that while popular fiction conventions determine and limit authentic portraits of Native American cultures, successful popular fiction writers approach literary quality by fusing authentic Native American culture with the standard genre conventions. Approximately 200 books are discussed and evaluated, and true Native American stories and writings are contrasted with mainstream versions of Indian culture.

Narratives of suspicion and mistrust have escaped the boundaries of specific sites of discourse to constitue a metanarrative that pervades American culture. Sandra Baringer investigates this phenomenon.