Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko

Silko spent a decade writing her next novel, “ Almanac of the Dead,” a sprawling work about the United States-Mexico border, the black-market trade in arms and drugs, and ecological catastrophe. It remains one of the most important works of Native American literature. The book bends and stretches the novel form, incorporating poetry and oral traditions. It was published in 1977 and helped secure Silko a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1981.ġ The book follows Tayo, a half Pueblo veteran of the Second World War, who has come back from the Pacific with P.T.S.D., tormented by the knowledge that the United States government used him and other Native men for its war, giving those lucky enough to survive nothing in return. She appears to have arrived fully formed as a writer: one of her first stories impressed an editor at Viking Press, Richard Seaver, who offered her a book deal Silko, who had moved to Alaska with her husband, proceeded to write “ Ceremony,” her début novel. Silko is a gifted storyteller, and her writing is filled with intimate and antic accounts of relationships between humans and animals. I was delighted but almost unsurprised by the tale. But the bird was not dying, and proceeded to drag himself around Silko’s house, while another, an African gray, was flying loose in the home, which is why she couldn’t come to the phone when I called. She brought the bird inside and propped him up on her bed, with the aim of giving him a dignified death. She has a number of macaws, and she’d been nervous that one of them had suffered a stroke and was going to die.

The next day, Silko told me, digressively and with relish, what had happened.

His mother was tending to a bird emergency, he explained. When I called the Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko, in January, to arrange an interview, her son answered the phone.

Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko