Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Alexie, Sherman (Vol. 154) - Leslie Ullman (review date summer 1993)

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Leslie Ullman (review date summer 1993)

SOURCE: Ullman, Leslie. “Betrayals and Boundaries: A Question of Balance.” Kenyon Review 15, no. 3 (summer 1993): 186–88.

[In the following excerpt, Ullman offers a positive assessment of the equivocal and metaphysical nature of The Business of Fancydancing.]

Sherman Alexie's collection of poems and stories [in The Business of Fancydancing] weaves a curiously soft-blended tapestry of humor, humility, pride, and metaphysical provocation out of the hard realities that make up its material: the tin-shack lives, the alcohol dreams, the bad luck and burlesque disasters, and the self-destructive courage of his characters, all Coeur D'Alene Indians living on the Spokane Indian reservation. Alexie is a member of this tribe. This, his first published collection, is tautly written and versatile in its use of forms, which include prose vignettes, two villanelle, and several delicately constructed,...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Leslie Ullman (review date summer 1993)
   2. Verlyn Klinkenborg (review date 18 June 1995)
   3. Denise Low (review date winter 1996)
   4. Jennifer Gillan (essay date March 1996)
   5. Lee Lemon (review date Spring 1996)
   6. Howard Meredith (review date Spring 1996)
   7. Sherman Alexie and Doug Marx (interview date 16 September 1996)
   8. Madison Smart Bell (review date 17 November 1996)
   9. Sherman Alexie and Erik Himmelsbach (interview date 17 December 1996)
   10. Judith Bolton-Fasman (review date 6 January 1997)
   11. Robert L. Berner (review date spring 1997)
   12. Peter Donahue (essay date Spring 1997)
   13. Ron McFarland (essay date Spring 1997)
   14. Sherman Alexie and John Purdy (interview date 4 October 1997)
   15. Michael Gorra (review date 5 March 1998)
   16. Sherman Alexie and Dennis West and Joan M. West (interview date fall 1998)
   17. Dan Georgakas (review date fall 1998)
   18. Jonathan Levi (review date 18 June 2000)
   19. Jonathan Penner (review date 9 July 2000)
   20. Joyce Carol Oates (review date 20 July 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Sherman Alexie