This collection showcases the best writings of Stephen Graham Jones, whose career is developing rapidly from the noir underground to the mainstream. The Faster Redder Road features excerpts from Jones’s novels—including The Last Final Girl, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Not for Nothing, and The Gospel of Z—and short stories, some never before published in book form. Examining Jones’s contributions to American literature as well as noir, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.’s introduction puts Jones on the literary map.
This collection showcases the best writings of Stephen Graham Jones, whose career is developing rapidly from the noir underground to the mainstream. The Faster Redder Road features excerpts from Jones's novels--including The Last Final Girl, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Not for Nothing, and The Gospel of Z--and short stories, some never before published in book form. Examining Jones's contributions to American literature as well as noir, Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.'s introduction puts Jones on the literary map.
This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians.
Chicago: home to urban Indians and immigrants and working folks and the whole gamut of people getting by in a world that doesn’t care whether they do so or not. Sacred City is an incomparable follow-up to Van Alst’s award-winning debut collection, Sacred Smokes. Our young narrator now heads deeper into the heart of the city and himself, accompanied by ancestors and spirits who help him and the reader see that Chicago was, is, and always will be Indian Country. Part love song and part lament, Sacred City explores what options are available to an intelligent, smart-assed young man who was born poor and grew up in a gang. Van Alst’s skillful storytelling takes us on a journey where Chicago will never seem the same.
Set along the Southwestern border, these stories explore growing up Hispanic and weaving together three distinct worlds--Mexico, the United States, and childhood.
Even as Stephen Graham Jones generates a dizzying range of brilliant fiction, his work remains strikingly absent from scholarly conversations about Native and western American literature, owing in part to his unapologetic embrace of popular genres such as horror and science fiction. Steeped in dense narrative references, literary and historical allusions, and experimental postmodern stylings, his fiction informs a broad array of literary and popular conversations. The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones is the first collection of scholarship on Jones’s ever-expanding oeuvre. The diverse methodologies that inform these essays—from Native American critical theory to poststructuralism and gothic noirism—illuminate the unique complexity of Jones’s narrative worlds while positioning his works within broader conversations in literary studies and popular culture. Jones challenges at every turn the notions of what constitutes Native American literature and what it means to be a Native American writer. Contributing editor Billy J. Stratton foregrounds these heavily contested questions and their ongoing relevance to readers and critics alike.
PURA BELPRÉ HONOR BOOK ALA NOTABLE BOOK “An important, must-have addition to the growing body of literature with immigrant themes.” —School Library Journal (starred review) Twelve-year-old Jaime makes the treacherous and life-changing journey from his home in Guatemala to live with his older brother in the United States in this “powerful and timely” (Booklist, starred review) middle grade novel. Jaime is sitting on his bed drawing when he hears a scream. Instantly, he knows: Miguel, his cousin and best friend, is dead. Everyone in Jaime’s small town in Guatemala knows someone who has been killed by the Alphas, a powerful gang that’s known for violence and drug trafficking. Anyone who refuses to work for them is hurt or killed—like Miguel. With Miguel gone, Jaime fears that he is next. There’s only one choice: accompanied by his cousin Ángela, Jaime must flee his home to live with his older brother in New Mexico. Inspired by true events, The Only Road is an individual story of a boy who feels that leaving his home and risking everything is his only chance for a better life. The story is “told with heartbreaking honesty,” Booklist raved, and “will bring readers face to face with the harsh realities immigrants go through in the hope of finding a better, safer life, and it will likely cause them to reflect on what it means to be human.”
Jack Reacher races to solve the perfect crime in the fourth novel in Lee Child’s New York Times bestselling series. Across the country, women are being murdered, victims of a disciplined and clever killer who leaves no trace evidence, no fatal wounds, no signs of struggle, and no clues to an apparent motive. They are, truly, perfect crimes. In fact, there’s only one thing that links the victims. Each one of the women knew Jack Reacher—and it’s got him running blind.
At once informative, comic, and plaintive, Seeing Red—Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins is an anthology of critical reviews that reexamines the ways in which American Indians have traditionally been portrayed in film. From George B. Seitz’s 1925 The Vanishing American to Rick Schroder’s 2004 Black Cloud, these 36 reviews by prominent scholars of American Indian Studies are accessible, personal, intimate, and oftentimes autobiographic. Seeing Red—Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins offers indispensible perspectives from American Indian cultures to foreground the dramatic, frequently ridiculous difference between the experiences of Native peoples and their depiction in film. By pointing out and poking fun at the dominant ideologies and perpetuation of stereotypes of Native Americans in Hollywood, the book gives readers the ability to recognize both good filmmaking and the dangers of misrepresenting aboriginal peoples. The anthology offers a method to historicize and contextualize cinematic representations spanning the blatantly racist, to the well-intentioned, to more recent independent productions. Seeing Red is a unique collaboration by scholars in American Indian Studies that draws on the stereotypical representations of the past to suggest ways of seeing American Indians and indigenous peoples more clearly in the twenty-first century.
