Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Alexie, Sherman (Vol. 96) - Alex Kuo (essay date 1992)

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Alex Kuo (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: "Introduction," in The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems by Sherman Alexie, Hanging Loose Press, 1992, p. v.

[In the essay below, Kuo describes the wide range of cultural references in Alexie's prose and verse.]

Sherman Alexie's territory, as he describes in these forty poems and five stories [in The Business of Fancydancing], ranges from the All-Indian Six-Foot-And-Under Basketball Tournament to ESPN to the politics of geography and family to powwows to Indians "not drinking enough." Alexie's work has escaped the pervasive influence of writing workshops, academic institutions and their subsidized intellect, and has instead focused on reservation and border realities in his eastern section of Washington state.

Central to this landscape inhabited by family, friends, and a wild coterie of reservation cops, seers, Buffalo Bills, Crazy Horses, and of course, fancydancers, is the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Alex Kuo (essay date 1992)
   2. Publishers Weekly (review date 1 February 1993)
   3. The New Yorker (essay date 10 May 1993)
   4. Sybil S. Steinberg (review date 19 July 1993)
   5. Andrea-Bess Baxter (review date August 1993)
   6. Brian Schneider (review date Fall 1993)
   7. Reynolds Price (review date 17 October 1993)
   8. Anne Goodwin Sides (review date 17 October 1993)
   9. Publishers Weekly (review date 8 November 1993)
   10. Frank Allen (review date 15 November 1993)
   11. Joseph Bruchac (review date Winter 1994)
   12. Alan R. Velie (review date Spring 1994)
   13. James Beschta (review date May 1994)
   14. Carl L. Bankston III (review date May-June 1994)
   15. Andrea-Bess Baxter (review date November 1994)
   16. Leslie Marmon Silko (review date 12 June 1995)
   17. Frederick Busch (review date 16 July 1995)
   18. Abigail Davis (review date July-August 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Leslie Marmon Silko
2. Sherman Alexie