Leslie Marmon Silko

Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution. Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremony that defeats the most virulent of afflictions—despair.

Ceremony

A collection of stories focuses on contemporary Native American concerns--white injustice, the fragmenting of the Indian community, and the loss of tribal identity--and recalls Indian legends and tribal stories

Storyteller

A poetic self-portrait combines family stories with reflections on the creatures and terrain observed on the Sonoran desert arroyos of Arizona during meditative walks that have been influenced by Native American storytelling traditions. By the author of Ceremony.

The Turquoise Ledge

A tour de force examination of the historical conflict between Native and Anglo Americans by critically acclaimed author Leslie Marmon Silko, under the hot desert sun of the American Southwest. In this virtuoso symphony of character and culture, Leslie Marmon Silko’s breathtaking novel interweaves ideas and lives, fate and history, passion and conquest in an attempt to re-create the moral history of the Americas as told from the point of view of the conquered, not the conquerors. Touching on issues as disparate as the borderlands drug wars, ecological devastation committed for the benefit of agriculture, and the omnipresence of talking heads on American daytime television, The Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale, a sweeping epic of displacement, intrigue, and violent redemption.

A Novel

The Almanac of the Dead

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.

Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit

An Indian girl left orphaned after soldiers raid and destroy her village is adopted by a well-meaning American family, but she cannot forget her past and accept the white traditions and education they expect her to embrace. 35,000 first printing. Tour.

Gardens in the Dunes

'An exceptional novel ... a cause for celebration' Washington Post 'The most accomplished Native American writer of her generation' The New York Times Book Review Tayo, a young Second World War veteran of mixed ancestry, is coming home. But, returning to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, he finds himself scarred by his experiences as a prisoner of war, and further wounded by the rejection he finds among his own people. Only by rediscovering the traditions, stories and ceremonies of his ancestors can he start to heal, and find peace. 'Ceremony is the greatest novel in Native American literature. It is one of the greatest novels of any time and place' Sherman Alexie

Sacred water 

Tero Valkonen

Riitti

"The Delicacy and Strength of Lace" "Letters between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright" 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."

Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko & James Wright

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace

In the past twenty-five years many Native American writers have retold the traditional stories of powerful mythological women: Corn Woman, Changing Woman, Serpent Woman, and Thought Woman, who with her sisters created all life by thinking it into being. Within and in response to these evolving traditions, Leslie Marmon Silko takes from her own tradition, the Keres of Laguna, the Yellow Woman. Yellow Woman stories, always female-centered and always from the Yellow Woman's point of view, portray a figure who is adventurous, strong, and often alienated from her own people. She is the spirit of woman. Ambiguous and unsettling, Silko's "Yellow Woman" explores one woman's desires and changes--her need to open herself to a richer sensuality. Walking away from her everyday identity as daughter, wife and mother, she takes possession of transgressive feelings and desires by recognizing them in the stories she has heard, by blurring the boundaries between herself and the Yellow Woman of myth. Silko's decision to tell the story from the narrator's point of view is traditional, but her use of first person narration and the story's much raised ambiguity brilliantly reinforce her themes. Like traditional yellow women, the narrator is unnamed. By choosing not to reveal her name, she claims the role of Yellow Woman, and Yellow Woman's story is the one Silko clearly claims as her own. The essays in this collection compare Silko's many retellings of Yellow Woman stories from a variety of angles, looking at crucial themes like storytelling, cultural inheritances, memory, continuity, identity, interconnectedness, ritual, and tradition. This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology, an authoritative text of the story itself, critical essays, and a bibliography for further reading in both primary and secondary sources. Contributors include Kim Barnes, A. LaVonne Ruoff, Paula Gunn Allen, Patricia Clark Smith, Bernard A. Hirsch, Arnold Krupat, Linda Danielson, and Patricia Jones.

Yellow Woman

Helen Jaskoski

Helen Jaskoski examines Leslie Silko's short stories, focusing on Silko's use of the physical and cultural geography of the Southwest and the history of Laguna Pueblo.

A Study of the Short Fiction

Poems

Laguna Woman

A new novella from the acclaimed author of Ceremony, and Almanac of the Dead. Leslie Marmon Silko is the author of the novels Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, and Gardens in the Dunes. She has also written many short stories, poems and essays, and her most recent book is a memoir, The Turquoise Ledge. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and an NEA fellowship, Silko lives in Tucson, Arizona, on the boundary of Saguaro National Park West.

Oceanstory

Offers insight into the author's life through her own words, providing information on her life in Albuquerque and her experiences as a women of mixed ancestry.

Leslie Marmon Silko

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