Blasphemy New and Selected Stories

The author of the PEN/Faulkner award-winning War Dances combines his classic short stories with new ones in an anthology that features donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines and marriage.



A mix of new and older stories, spanning 20 years of work by Sherman Alexie, a master storyteller who has been honored with numerous awards. Alexie is constantly experimenting with form, but he never forgets to be funny. He laces his incisive observations about race, class, gender, sex, infidelity, and Indian and non-Indian bigotry with biting wit. Standouts among the older stories: "Indian Country," which opens with a noted Coeur d'Alene author arriving in Montana to learn he's been jilted by a Navajo woman, and "War Dances," the story of a 41-year-old undergoing MRIs and steroid treatments for sudden deafness, which probes a still-painful father-son connection. New stories include the raucous "Midnight Basketball," in which one teammate disses Obama's jump shot, and "Cry Cry Cry," which begins, "Forget crack, my cousin, Junior, said, meth is the new war dancer," and takes the cousins through to Junior's brutal end. These are stories that provoke and illuminate.