Combines fifteen of the author's classic short stories with fifteen new stories in an anthology that features tales involving donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, and marriage. In these comfort-zone-destroying tales, including the masterpiece, War Dances, characters grapple with racism, damaging stereotypes, poverty, alcoholism, diabetes, and the tragic loss of languages and customs. Questions of authenticity and identity abound.

Thunder Boy Jr. is named after his dad, but he wants a name that's all his own. Just because people call his dad Big Thunder doesn't mean he wants to be Little Thunder. He wants a name that celebrates something cool he's done, like Touch the Clouds, Not Afraid of Ten Thousand Teeth, or Full of Wonder. But just when Thunder Boy Jr. thinks all hope is lost, he and his dad pick the perfect name... a name that is sure to light up the sky.

From the Publisher: In this first full collection in nine years, Alexie's poems and prose show his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions. Novelist, storyteller and performer, he won the National Book Award for his YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. His work has been praised throughout the world, but the bedrock remains what The New York Times Book Review said of his very first book: "Mr. Alexie's is...

The plight of John Smith, an Indian stolen as a baby from his parents and brought up by whites. Angry because he has no roots he joins the street people, becoming a suspect when Seattle is hit by a serial killer who scalps his all-white victims. By the author of Reservation Blues. While a serial killer stalks and scalps white men in Seattle, John Smith, a Native American adopted into a white family, becomes dissatisfied with his life, and, as the...

Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

In his darkly comic short story collection, the author brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-four interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, yet filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents...