The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven

This books got me hooked on Sherman Alexie. Such a quirky tale, and impossible to put down!

This is Alexie's breakthrough book that some call a collection of short stories and others a interconnected novel. No matter what you call it, its a wonderful and beautiful series of stories that tells of the lives of American Indians in the Pacific Northwest in the 70's and 80's. Some are just

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that, stories about life, like "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Anymore", where a couple of guys hang out on the porch and what the world go by at their feet. To the almost science-fiction story called "Distances", where Alexie examines what might happen after some apocalypse where the only survivors are Indians living on the "Rez".

I'm not a poetry guy, but a lot of the time this book reads as prose for poetry. Excellent.

"Hell, my joy in winning is always much smaller than my pain in losing." - Introduction

"It's hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on the table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope its good beer. Still, Indians have a way of surviving. But it's almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It's the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn't take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins." - The Only Traffic Signal...

"The television was always loud, too loud, until every emotion was measured by the half hour. We hid our faces behind masks that suggested other histories; we touched hands accidentally and our skin sparked like a personal revolution We stared across the room at each other, waited for the conversation and the conversion, watched wasps and flies battering against the windows. We were children; we were open mouths. Open in hunger, in anger, in laughter, in prayer. Jesus, we all want to survive." - Family Portrait

10/10

S: 6/1/17 - 6/20/17 (21 Days)

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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of short stories set on a contemporary Indian reservation. The stories, loosely interconnected, focus on the lives of Victor, Junior, and Thomas Builds the Fire, weaving back and forth between childhoods marked by alcoholic parents and

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adulthoods of broken dreams. The collection is both a eulogy for a lost culture and a testament to the bleak lives awaiting the children of a broken people, but each story relates these themes in a unique way. Some of them are harsh and realistic, while others drift into fantasy, post-apocalyptic science fiction, and magic realism inspired by the legends of Native American culture. What ties the story together is the unique rhythm of Alexie's prose, coupled with a sense of humor that keeps these sad stories from becoming too depressing to read. This is a rare glimpse into a world too few of us see or understand, and it left an impression on me that I'm sure will linger for awhile.

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A collection of short, extremely simple and clear stories - as Alexie's forward in the edition I read points out, these are almost like skeleton stories - bare bones, little description of physical attributes or places - which makes the characters shine through all the more clearly. The stories are

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collected and not chronological; you are hit with realizations throughout the book about who someone in a previous story was.

The stories are engaging, and make you think, and stand out from the crowd a bit. I'd recommend them to everyone.

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Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Harper Perennial, 1993. A collection of short stories. I've singled out "The only traffic signal..." and "The appoximate size of my favorite tumor" as particularly good ones. "This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona" is the title

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story of an upcoming film based on this book.

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I was prompted to read Sherman Alexie's stories because . . . well I've always wanted to read some of his work. And I had the opportunity to watch the movie "Smoke Signals," which I enjoyed very much.

Alexie's collection of short stories focus on the lives of people young and old on the Spokane

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reservation in eastern Washington State. Though many of the stories have moments of laugh out loud humor, it is painted against a background of poverty, alcoholism and cultural isolation. I think my favorite stories are "The Trial of Thomas Builds the Fire" and "The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor," but all in the collection were worth reading.

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Sherman Alexie is certainly a fresh voice in American literature. With straightforward prose this collection of linked stories establishes the themes that he will revisit in most of his later work. We see the poor, desperate state of Native Americans on the Rez, but also their joys and triumphs.

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America is a better place because of Alexie's work.

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Great short story collection. The movie is Reservation Blues.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of inter-related short stories, that all take place on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington. Alexie does a great job of evoking a very bittersweet atmosphere about the reservation, and as the same cast of characters are woven in

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and out of each of the stories, so we get a sense of their community and relationships and struggles.

But the greatest conflicts in these stories aren't from relationships, but from the attempt to reconcile being an American Indian in a modern American culture that doesn't especially care about American Indians. They love and cling tight to their traditions, but also see the inevitable motions toward assimilation. And really, everything that they gained from assimilating is bad: alcoholism, homophobia, fathers walking out on their families and children. The book raises the question of what American Indians should be asking of America - or rather, what they *can* ask of America.

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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie (2005)

These short stories are a mixture of tragedy, comedy, and very definitely, realism. They are a poignant look into the Native American culture that has been decimated by modern life and the loss of their old ways. At the same time, it is a look into the ties that bind and in spite of much of the

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dysfunctional lives we see, we yearn to have the same connection between family members and friends that are found in these stories.

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I've read Sherman Alexie before, but this is going back in his writing history. It shows; the stories are more raw, which can be a good thing but also leaves plenty undone.
The pain of poverty and oppression of life on a reservation is more evident and his dry humour less so. Still, it's not one to

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miss.

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Ball players and magicians (of all kinds) populate the 24 stories (the latest edition includes 2 which were originally cut). Both professions require their top talents to make the impossible look easy, exactly what Alexie does in this thematically unified collection of short stories. His prose is

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deceptively approachable: more Hemingway than Faulkner (it is not surprising he won the Special Citation for the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction). His words are precisely and carefully colloquial, the conversations so real you almost instantly forget you’re reading them and instead lean in to hear better. As in Hemingway, his characters partake of the sacraments of real life: in this case, fry bread and Diet Pepsi, whiskey and vodka, jokes and tears. Quickly calibrated to the rhythm of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation, we settle in for a captivating story of kids and adults in dire straits surviving and dreaming, but that’s just the beginning. Like a boy hopping from rock to rock down the bank of a river, sometimes teetering, jumping left, jumping right, backing up, Alexie touches on history, myth, fantasy, emotion, storytelling and pain without missing a beat, without an awkward segue, without falling off moss-covered boulders of race and racism; all the while making his way down the bank of the river to the edge of the falls where the story comes together and pours down into a dark deep pool of resonating truth. Before the reader is aware anything extraordinary has occurred, Alexie has pulled a Camaro out of their ear and launched them bodily cross-court in a multidimensional slam dunk, all in ten pages. And then you start the next story.

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First Line: Although it was winter, the nearest ocean four hundred miles away, and the Tribal Weatherman asleep because of boredom, a hurricane dropped from the sky in 1976 and fell so hard on the Spokane Indian Reservation that it knocked Victor from bed and his latest nightmare.

The Lone Ranger

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and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of short stories written by one of my favorite authors, Sherman Alexie. Alexie's writing can be very powerful and beautiful, and it has the added bonus of taking us out of our comfort zones and letting us see "how the other half lives" in the United States. Alexie is a Spokane Indian, and his writing has been formed in part by growing up on the reservation.

Growing up in central Illinois, I had no clue about reservations, other than knowing that the governmental policy always seemed to be one of placing reservations on worthless pieces of land. It wasn't until I moved to Arizona and could drive to places like Chinle or Page that I realized that there are indeed countries within the United States. The Navajo Nation is a nation. It has its own police force, its own language, and-- unlike the rest of Arizona-- observes Daylight Savings Time. The trials many Navajo face just to have enough water for themselves and their livestock on a daily basis are trials that you and I would never put up with. We deserve better. (Hopefully I didn't lace that last bit with too much sarcasm.)

We need writers like Alexie. Not only does he possess story-telling magic, he reminds us that we need to take off our rose-colored glasses from time to time and take a much closer look at America. There's work to be done. This collection of short stories contains the seeds of future films and books. It spans several years in his development as a writer, since some were written when he was nineteen:

"So why am I telling you that these stories are true? First of all, they're not really true. They are the vision of one individual looking at the lives of his family and his entire tribe, so these stories are necessarily biased, incomplete, exaggerated, deluded, and often just plain wrong. But in trying to make them true and real, I am writing what might be called reservation realism."

I would imagine that, if all writers were completely honest with us, they'd have to say that what they write is often biased, incomplete, exaggerated, deluded, and just plain wrong. Sometimes you need to do some (or all) of those things to get your point across. Although these stories aren't as strong as his novels Indian Killer or Flight (both of which blew me away), I'm glad I read these stories. They are good, and they show the evolution of a very gifted writer.

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I feel a bit mixed about this book, which is a collection of 22 connected short stories, some in first and some in third person. The book was on a list of recommended literary fiction. Picking it up, I realized that though I've read many a book by African Americans, several assigned in school, I

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couldn't recall ever reading a work of fiction by a Native American about Native Americans. I found myself jotting down the unfamiliar or recurring words and themes, wanting to learn more later: frybread, salmon, commodity cheese, alcoholism, diabetes, sweathouse, longhouse, HUD, fancydancing, owldancing, basketball, powwow, tipi, braids, ribbon shirt, five hundred years.

That glimpse into another world, the world of the Spokane Indian Reservation, is a lot of what kept me reading, but I wondered at times when Alexie was giving us a look behind the stereotypes or playing with them. Especially given the touches of magical realism, I found myself wishing at times this was straight memoir and not (as admitted in the introduction) autobiographically inspired fiction.

This is a very bleak book--so much of it dealt with drunkenness and alcoholism and the self-destructive behavior it engenders, sprinkled with historical grievance and the experience of present-day bigotry and a terrible poverty. The most upbeat tale in the book revolved around a terminally ill cancer patient: "The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor." Two of the other standouts for me were "Fun House," about a women who finally has had it with the behavior of her husband and son, and "Indian Education." Here's a quote from that story that stuck with me:

The farm town high school I play for is nicknamed the "Indians," and I'm probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot. This morning I pick up the sports page and read the headline: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN. Go ahead and tell me none of this is supposed to hurt me very much.

I think that's a passage that captures a lot about the book. Clean, spare style, sometimes lyrical, spiked with a dark humor.

I find myself dithering about the rating here. I don't know if it's a book that I can say I enjoyed, or one where the individual stories impressed--I think it's one where the whole is more than its parts, but the repeated (and repetitive) notes of hopelessness ground me down. However, the book did make me think and a time or two broke my heart a little, and I think it'll stay with me.

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So what is reservation realism? Through the course of these twenty-four interconnected short stories you learn of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation and of the many Native Americans who call it home. Victor Joseph and his family and friends, like Thomas Builds-the-Fire are the narrative

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centers. The stories of the modern Indians are not very hopeful, and are drenched in alcoholism and all kinds of abuse. Despite these characters being the victims of circumstance, Sherman Alexie makes these stories easier to handle with humor and unforgettable characters.

I’m usually a person who tries to block out reality and search for “happily ever afters,” but despite that I still loved this book. Alexie’s humorous voice and beautiful prose made this collection so dear to my heart. The characters in this book are searching for their different versions of happy and some might never get it, but that’s not stopping them from trying.

One of my favorites from this book is the title story where Victor returns to the reservation from living in Seattle with his white girlfriend.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is poetic and real. It’s the perfect Sherman Alexie book to start with, because once you read this one, you’ll want to read more.

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A ten anniversary edition of Sherman Alexie’s first short story collection that focuses on the lives of Native Americans on a Spokane, Washington reservation. The book provides the reader with a sense of the importance of oral history to the traditions of Native American storytelling. The

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collection also exhibits how suffering is a constant presence in Native American lore as it is a constant presence in their daily lives.

Another informative aspect of the work is that of magical realism—how it is not a technique employed by the storyteller, but rather inherently and inextricably ingrained in the culture, which is representative of the causes for conflict with characters from the white, dominant society.

Wonderful collection.

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Bittersweet, often funny, vignettes about the harsh realities of life on the res.

Beautifully written. In this collection of short stories, Sherman Alexie portrays myriad scenes of Indian life, capturing emotion with an appealing simplicity.

Like the character of Thomas the best.

Sherman Alexie writes wonderful prose and poetry. It is very abrupt and very lyrical at the same time. His imagery is wonderful to read, though the stories are often sad or difficult to read (that because of content not style). Alexie's point of view is original and sometimes controversial, but

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always great to read.

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Love love love Sherman Alexie and the way he tells stories about the power of words. Great mix of black comedy and heart-wrenching, but never cloying, social commentary. Highly recommend his work if you've never read it before.

good, but i much prefer his absolutely true diary of part time indian. the illustrations and narrator's voice spoke to me more clearly.

I read this for my American Indian History class and I liked it a lot. It was funny, sad, and moving in the way that Alexie always manages perfectly. It was a great collection of short stories that tells stories of a young boy, Victor, who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation.