Standalone Novels In Publication Order
- Ceremony (1977)
- Almanac of the Dead (1991)
- Gardens in the Dunes (1999)
Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order
- Oceanstory (2011)
Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order
- The Delicacy and Strength of Lace (1985)
- Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1993)
- Sacred Water (1993)
- The Turquoise Ledge (2010)
Collections In Publication Order
- Storyteller (1980)
- Yellow Woman (1993)
- Laguna Woman (1994)
Standalone Novels Book Covers
Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers
Non-Fiction Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Leslie Marmon Silko Books Overview
Ceremony
Thirty years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a Ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power.
Almanac of the Dead
In its extraordinary range of character and culture, Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale. The acclaimed author of Ceremony has undertaken a weaving of ideas and lives, fate and history, passion and conquest in an attempt to re create the moral history of the Americas, told from the point of view of the conquered, not the conquerors. Author readings.
Gardens in the Dunes
In a novel that moves with extraordinary fluidity and grace between two diametrically opposed worlds the timeless, ‘traditional’ world of Native American peoples and the elaborate, stylized world of European and American upper class culture at its glittering, falsely glamorous zenith before the First World War Leslie Marmon Silko, the author of such highly praised works of fiction as Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, has written what Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Lonesome Dove, calls ‘a little masterpiece.’With the sure hand and unerring eye of a mature artist, Silko takes the reader on a Grand Tour of England and Europe in the era of Henry James in a novel peopled with characters whose sensibility and language are brilliantly Jamesian, as seen through the eyes of a young Native American girl, Indigo, who is in flight from the destruction at the hands of the whites of her own tribal world. Indigo’s fascination with the world of luxury and privilege never eclipses her instinctive faith in the traditions and the culture of her own people, or her desire to return home to what remains of her tribe and her family. Spanning the jungles of Brazil, the gardens and stately homes of England and Europe, the desert of the American Southwest, and the great estates of the American rich at the height of the Gilded Age, Gardens in the Dunes is an ambitious, fully realized novel about the fatal collision between two cultures, that of the colonizers and that of the indigenous peoples they have conquered, and about the ideas, beliefs, and structures of time, mind, and habit that bind and sunder them. At the heart of the book is Indigo herself a young child of the Sand Lizard people, who runs away from the government school to which the soldiers have taken her to be brought up in the ways of the white world. Until then, Indigo and her sister, Sister Salt, have lived with their grandmother, Grandma Fleet, a last, tiny remnant of a tribe that has been driven from its home among the garden terraces carved out of the sand dunes, and so reduced that Grandma Fleet and the girls have fallen from selling handmade baskets to tourists at the railway station to scavenging from the town dump. Yet they have not lost their tribal identity or their faith in the coming of a Messiah who will return to their people perhaps to all the Indian peoples their land, and whose coming is sought by means of the Ghost Dance, which has been strictly forbidden by government. Hattie, Indigo’s kindhearted and determined rescuer, is herself something of rebel. Married to Edward, an older man, wealthy, well connected, a much traveled gentleman scholar, botanist, and explorer who nurses complex schemes for making a vast fortune with exotic plants. Hattie has defied the prevailing Victorian standards for young ladies by pursuing her own career as a scholar she is something of a bluestocking and by not producing an heir. In Indigo, Hattie finds at once a cure for her own loneliness and lack of love for Edward, however well intentioned, is at best a diffident, remote, and unpassionate husband and a new object of study. Kind, observant, optimistic, full of good intentions, Hattie methodically sets about transforming Indigo, whose high spirits and native intelligence soon re emerge into a ‘proper,’ well brought up American child, a transformation that is doomed to fail, for Indigo’s view of the world is very different from Hattie’s. In the end, by small degrees, they and we begin to understand that Hattie has at least as much to learn from the child as the child does from her perhaps more. Gardens in the Dunes builds to a rich and unexpected climax in which Hattie finds herself reduced to poverty, thrown out of the society in which she has always lived so comfortably however much she chafed at its rules, and is herself rescued by Indigo’s people at the precise moment when the Ghost Dance is sweeping through the pueblos and reservations of the Indian peoples of the Southwest, bringing relationships between them and the whites to a new and dangerous level of tension. Satisfying, multifaceted, wise, and compassionate, Gardens in the Dunes is cause for celebration a major novel by perhaps the most gifted and best known of Native American writers today.
The Delicacy and Strength of Lace
This moving, eighteen month exchange of correspondence chronicles the friendship through the mail of two extraordinary writers. Leslie Marmon Silko is a poet and novelist. James Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his Collected Poems. They met only twice. First, briefly, in 1975, at a writers conference in Michigan. Their correspondence began three years later, after Wright wrote to Silko praising her book Ceremony. The letters begin formally, and then each writer gradually opens to the other, venturing to share his or her life, work and struggles. The second meeting between the two writers came in a hospital room, as James Wright lay dying of cancer. The New York Times wrote something of Wright that applies to both writers of qualities that this exchange of letters makes evident. ‘Our age desperately needs his vision of brotherly love, his transcendent sense of nature, the clarity of his courageous voice.’
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit
Bold and impassioned, sharp and defiant, Leslie Marmon Silko’s essays evoke the spirit and voice of Native Americans. Whether she is exploring the vital importance literature and language play in Native American heritage, illuminating the inseparability of the land and the Native American people, enlivening the ways and wisdom of the old time people, or exploding in outrage over the government’s long standing, racist treatment of Native Americans, Silko does so with eloquence and power, born from her profound devotion to all that is Native American. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit is written with the fire of necessity. Silko’s call to be heard is unmistakable; there are stories to remember, injustices to redress, ways of life to preserve. It is a work of major importance, filled with indispensable truths a work by an author with an original voice and a unique access to both worlds.
The Turquoise Ledge
A highly original and poetic self portrait from one of America’s most acclaimed writers. Leslie Marmon Silko’s new book, her first in ten years, combines memoir with family history and reflections on the creatures and beings that command her attention and inform her vision of the world, taking readers along on her daily walks through the arroyos and ledges of the Sonoran desert in Arizona. Silko weaves tales from her family’s past into her observations, using the turquoise stones she finds on the walks to unite the strands of her stories, while the beauty and symbolism of the landscape around her, and of the snakes, birds, dogs, and other animals that share her life and form part of her family, figure prominently in her memories. Strongly influenced by Native American storytelling traditions, The Turquoise Ledge becomes a moving and deeply personal contemplation of the enormous spiritual power of the natural world of what these creatures and landscapes can communicate to us, and how they are all linked. The book is Silko’s first extended work of nonfiction, and its ambitious scope, clear prose, and inventive structure are captivating. The Turquoise Ledge will delight loyal fans and new readers alike, and it marks the return of the unique voice and vision of a gifted storyteller.
Yellow Woman
Defiant essays on the culture of Native Americans and their position in society consider such topics as the earth, the weather, and the injustice of the Anglo American legal system.Tour.
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