Fresh off his National Book Award win, Alexie delivers a heartbreaking, hilarious collection of stories that explores the precarious balance between self-preservation and external responsibility in art, family, and the world at large. With unparalleled insight into the minds of artists, laborers, fathers, husbands, and sons, Alexie populates his stories with ordinary men on the brink of exceptional change. In a bicoastal journey through the consequences of both simple and monumental life choices, Alexie introduces us to personal worlds as they transform beyond return. Brazen and wise, War Dances takes us to the heart of what it means to be human. This provocative new work is Alexie at the height of his powers.

(Source: Amazon.com, 2009)

In this first full collection in nine years, Alexie's poems and prose show his celebrated passion and wit while also exploring new directions.

(Pub. date: 2009)

In his first book for young adults, Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by acclaimed artist Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

(Source: Powells, September 2007)

Alexie's first novel in ten years is a powerful, fast, and timely story of a troubled foster teenager -- a boy who is not a "legal" Indian because he was never claimed by his father -- who learns the real meaning of terror by traveling back and forth through time in a violent search for his true identity. This young hero's journey begins as he's about to commit a massive act of violence. At the moment of decision, though, he finds himself shot back through time and resurfaced in the body of an FBI agent during the civil rights era. It is the first of several stops he will make in a shocking sojourn through pivotal moments of violence in American history. Simultaneously wrenching and deeply humorous, wholly contemporary yet steeped in American history, Flight is irrepressible, fearless, and groundbreaking Alexie.

(Source: Grove Atlantic, 2007)

Ten Little Indians offers eleven poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heartrending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love. Sherman Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candor that cut to the heart of the human experience, shedding brilliant light on what happens when we grow into and out of each other.

(Source: Grove Press, 2003)

This is the story of two American Indian boys on a journey. Victor is a stoic, handsome son of an alcoholic father. Thomas is a gregarious young man who lost his parents at a very young age. When Victor's estranged father dies, the two embark on an adventure to Phoenix to collect the ashes. Along the way, Smoke Signals illustrates the ties that bind these two very different young men and embraces the lessons they learn from each other.

In this collection of stories, we meet the kinds of American Indians we rarely see in literature - the upper and middle class, the professionals and white-collar workers, the bureaucrats and poets, falling in and out of love and wondering if they will make their way home.

In the 111-year life of the Spokane Indian reservation, not one person has arrived by accident -- until the day the black stranger appears with nothing more than the suit he wears and his guitar. The man is legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, in flight from the devil and presumed long dead. And when he passes his enchanted instrument to young Thomas-Builds-the-Fire - storyteller, misfit and musician - a magical odyssey begins.

In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These 22 interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream.