Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader

by Gerald Vizenor

Author of The Heirs of Columbus, Hotline Healers, Interior Landscapes, Crossbloods, and numerous other works, Gerald Vizenor is one of the century's most important and prolific Native American writers. Drawing on the best work of an acclaimed career, Shadow A Gerald Vizenor Reader reveals the wide range of his imagination and the evolution of his central themes.

This compelling collection includes not only selections from Vizenor's innovative fiction, but also poetry, autobiography, essays, journalism, and the previously unpublished screenplay "Harold of Orange," winner of the Film-in-the-Cities national screenwriting competition.

Whether focusing on Native American tricksters or legal and financial claims of tribal sovereignty, Vizenor continually underscores the diversities of modern traditions, the mixed ethnicity that characterizes those who claim Native American origin, and cultural permeability of an increasingly commercial, global world.

A. Robert Lee of the University of Kent at Canterbury, England, provides a lucid introduction to this writer whose "radically self-aware and contemporary satiric tricksterism . . . as easily invokes Jabes, Barthes, Lyotard, or Foucault as bear ceremonial, ghost dance, or dream-catcher."

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Gerald Robert Vizenor is an Anishinaabe writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life changer

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of excerpts from novels, non-fiction and other writing can’t be the best place to start with this guy. I can kind of see how some parts are meant to be funny. I can see how some parts are meant to flip the standard view of things, whether that’s a white standard or what Vizenor might call a tribal standard. I can see how it could work, like Ishmael Reed, something like that. Instead though it just came across as smug and obnoxious. I won’t be looking for more by this guy. I thought the most interesting was the autobiographical bits and the excerpt from “The Heirs of Columbus.” Most obnoxious was the script for “Harold of Orange.” I think I only finished this because of the sunken cost fallacy.