What's in this book
- Sherman Alexie's 1993 short story collection - twenty-two stories on and around the Spokane Indian Reservation
- PEN/Hemingway Award winner 1994; canonical contemporary Indigenous American short fiction
- 224 pages of patient first-person and third-person construction across the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene communities
- Basis for the 1998 Chris Eyre film Smoke Signals (the first all-Indigenous-American film crew production)
- Adam Beach audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Reservation Blues, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, There There, and canonical contemporary Indigenous American literary fiction
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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is Sherman Alexie's first major collection, published in 1993, and it remains a useful baseline for what the contemporary American short story can do when it stops trying to be respectable. The 22 stories are mostly set on or around the Spokane Reservation, mostly involve a recurring cast of characters (Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Victor, Junior), and mostly hit harder than the page count would suggest.
The stories that became the film Smoke Signals are here ("This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona" and "Every Little Hurricane"), and they are even better on the page. The lesser-known ones may be stronger. "The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor" is a piece of stand-up comedy disguised as fiction. "What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona" is a road-trip story that I have reread roughly once a year for a decade.
Alexie's prose has the rhythm of an oral storyteller who has heard a lot of bad academic writing and decided to do the opposite of all of it. The collection deserves its reputation. Five stars.
Related reads
If you liked The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Reservation Blues
by Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie's first novel. Robert Johnson hands his guitar to a kid on the Spokane Reservation. Magic realism with grief in the bones.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
YA semi-memoir about a kid who transfers off the rez to a white school. Funny, brutal, repeatedly banned, deserves to be read.
Indian Killer
by Sherman Alexie
Alexie's darkest novel. A serial killer is targeting white men in Seattle. The book is not interested in being a thriller.
The Toughest Indian in the World
by Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie's 2000 story collection. Tougher, sadder, more sexually frank than Lone Ranger and Tonto. The follow-up earns itself.
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