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The Toughest Indian in the World is Sherman Alexie's second major story collection, published in 2000, and the one that announced he was going to keep getting harder. The title story is one of the best things he ever wrote, a quiet road-trip piece about a Spokane journalist who picks up a hitchhiking Lummi boxer. It does almost nothing for most of its pages and then resolves in a way that I have thought about for years.
The collection as a whole is more sexually explicit and more direct about adult Native life than the earlier work. Some of the stories are pure short-form ambition (the title story, "Class," "South by Southwest"). Some of them feel like exercises that not all readers will sit with.
Alexie's prose continues to do what almost no one else's does: it sounds spoken. Four stars. Read after Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The harder edge is on purpose.
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