Native American Fiction

Rather than create a comprehensive cultural and historical genealogy for Native American literature, David Treuer investigates a selection of the most important Native American novels and, with a novelist’s eye and a critic’s mind, examines the intricate process of understanding literature on its own terms.

Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual is speculative, witty, engaging, and written for the inquisitive reader. These essays—on Erdrich, Silko, Welch, Cooper, Alexie, and Carter—are rallying cries for the need to read literature as literature and, ultimately, reassert the importance and primacy of the word.

“Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual convincingly questions the validity of the debates of authenticity that have surrounded discussions of Indian literature. David Treuer’s book is likely to become the manifesto of a new generation of Native American writers and critics and will be of interest to readers of literature anywhere.”—Werner Sollors, author of Beyond Ethnicity, Theories of Ethnicity, and The Invention of Ethnicity