Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories

Most anthologies are inconsistent, as the quality of the various contributions varies from author to author. "Talking Leaves" is, unfortunately, no exception. While editor Craig Lesley's decision to introduce several new (sometimes unpublished) writers is commendable, there are a few rather mediocre stories or vignettes. Also, I noticed a tendency on the part of Oregon-resident Lesley to slightly favor writers from Pacific Northwest nations. Nonetheless, I would say the vast majority of the contributions are very good, if not excellent, and the variety of styles and apects of Native American life/history it contains is very impressive. The excerpts taken out of novels, something I usually dislike, are fairly good and function well as short stories (i.e. from N. Scott Momaday's "Ancient Child" and James Welch's "Fools Crow"), even though it's still obvious that they are taken from larger works. By far the best contribution is "Aunt Moon's Young Man" by Linda Hogan. The longest story in the book, it is beautifully written and absorbing - I had the impression I had just finished a novel after reading it. Thomas King's "A Seat in the Garden" is also one of the better contributions, and absolutely hilarious. In fact, a nice aspect that comes out of many of the stories is the dry humor or humorous themes, from a white revival preacher's attempt to get a very relectant Indian family to pray with him to an elderly woman's dilemmas with a cheap, noisy new refrigerator. "Talking Leaves" is a good introduction to Native American literature, although it was published almost a decade ago, so it does not include some of the younger writers who emerged in the past few years (most notably Sherman Alexie).

This book was awesome! It was the most enchanting short stories I have ever read. It was marvelous.