[In the following review, Warrior states that Shadow Distance serves as an excellent introduction to Vizenor's extensive and varied oeuvre.]

For those who teach the work of the Anishanaabe novelist, poet, essayist, and critic Gerald Vizenor but never know what to assign from his massive and growing oeuvre, an answer has arrived. Shadow Distance, a reader of Vizenor's work, follows the many twists and turns of his writing career and offers substantial pieces of his creative path. For readers who have never encountered Vizenor's work before, this is an outstanding introduction.

The reader employs five sections. The first offers autobiographical selections and draws mainly from Vizenor's 1990 memoir Interior Landscapes. It also includes, though, an autobiographical essay in which he makes links between his work in tribal literature and his early work as a leading North American haikuist. He includes in that essay a number of his difficult-to-find haiku. The second section covers his long fictional works, The Heirs of Columbus (1991), Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1986), Dead Voices (1992), and Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1978, 1990). The selections are long enough to provide a long drink rather than just a few swallows of Vizenor's word games, shifting meanings, and agonistic point of view.

A section of stories follows, drawing on a number of collections Vizenor has written over more than a decade. These stories show how much Vizenor is able, using the short form, to make great impact. The longest section is a generous tour through his essays, including some from journals to which many people do not have easy access. Ishi, tribal casinos, the Sand Creek Massacre, and Anishanaabe history are some of the issues the essays cover. In this section the critical, incisive mind that exists alongside the fiction's creative thrust and power most clearly reveals itself. Finally, and what is perhaps most welcome, the volume includes the full text of Vizenor's screenplay Harold of Orange.

A. Robert Lee of the University of Kent at Canterbury provides an able and informative introduction. The six-page selected bibliography at book's end is a reminder of just how much Gerald Vizenor has contributed to American letters over the past three decades. By the end, the major themes of Vizenor's writing career to date are all there: his groundbreaking approach to trickster figures, his critical playfulness with language, and his attempt to find new ways of telling the truth artistically, academically, and politically. Shadow Distance is sure to be a wonderful pedagogical tool. The sheer pleasure of the artistry will no doubt impress those who have not previously encountered the range and creativity of this most significant twentieth-century American Indian writer.