Content area
Full text
Nancy J. Peterson, ed. Conversations with Sherman Alexie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 224 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $22.00.
Outspoken, popular, prolific, and incisive, Sherman Alexie (Spokane/ Coeur d'Alene) continues to garner attention as an indigenous writer of and for a contemporary moment. Conversations with Sherman Alexie (2009) offers new possibilities for assessing his rich body of work and the impact of his larger-than-life persona in various literary markets. Published as part of the Literary Conversations Series through the University Press of Mississippi, Conversations with Sherman Alexie reproduces twenty-one interviews in full and provides a detailed chronology for Alexies increasingly high-profile career, including the 2007 National Book Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. By featuring interviews with poets, indigenous literature scholars, reviewers for literary magazines, and bloggers on young adult literature, Conversations highlights Alexies success with diverse audiences as well as the persistent challenges facing indigenous writers, such as questions about what editor Nancy J. Peterson elsewhere terms "the nativeness of Native American literature."1 By limiting editorial commentary to the succinct introduction, Peterson succeeds in allowing readers "to locate themes and issues that have remained at the forefront of Alexies work, while also noting the ways in which his thinking on other topics has changed over the years" (xvii).
Conversations provides telling insights into Alexies interconnected roles of writer, entertainer, and public intellectual. He rejects traditions of silence or stereotype in order to write about "the kind of Indian that I am: kind of mixed up, kind of odd, not traditional. I'm...