First-Year Reading Experience – 2005
The University of Montana—Missoula is pleased to announce author Sherman Alexie’s work, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, as the title selected for the 2005 First-Year Reading Experience.
Through a collection of events and activities, incoming first-year students will have the opportunity to explore this book with their peers, their professors, and the broader campus community.
About
the Book These interwoven short stories take place in or near the Spokane Indian Reservation and serve as the basis for the motion picture Smoke Signals, winner of two Sundance Film Festival awards. These stories resonate with life and dream, events and stories, passion and myth. In “A Drug Called Tradition,” the second of these twenty-two stories, Alexie writes:
“There are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don’t wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dream, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they’re not necessarily evil, unless you let them be.”
This poignant collection builds on the experiences of characters like Victor whose “chest throbbed with absence;” and Thomas Builds-the-Fire who tells the stories; and James who was thrown from a burning house as a baby and waits to talk until he is nearly seven then says things like “the earth is an oval marble that nobody can win.”
The author Sherman Alexie is a poet, essayist, short story writer, and novelist. Leslie Mormon Silko in the Nation (1995, 260(23): 856) wrote: “…Sherman Alexie, has swept onto the publishing scene with poems and short stories that dazzle with wicked humor, lean, fresh language and deep affection for his characters. His collection of interlinked short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, won a number of prizes, including the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first book. My favorite story in that collection is titled "Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play `The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock." In “The Business of Fancydancing,” Alexie's characters from the Spokane reservation stop off in Reno. With their last dollars they hit the jackpot and live it up for about twenty-four hours before they lose it all again. The old American Dream: Hit the jackpot, win the lottery, bingo big.”
--Sue Samson, Humanities Librarian
Contact the First-Year Experience Committee
Webpages: Samantha Hines, Social Sciences and Outreach Librarian
Last updated: 18 July 2005