Almanac of the Dead

Praise

Praise for Almanac of the Dead:

“The best way to read Almanac of the Dead is to let it wash over you like a wave. It’s brisk and gorgeous . . . and it will sweep you off your feet . . . There is genius in the sheer, tireless variousness of the novel’s interconnecting tales . . . Almanac of the Dead burns at an apocalyptic pitch—passionate indictment, defiant augury, bravura storytelling.” —Elizabeth Tallent, The New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant, haunting, and tragic novel of ruin and resistance in the Americas. In a long dialectic, tinted with genius and compelled by a just anger, Silko dramatizes the often desperate struggle of native peoples in the Americas to keep, at all costs, the core of their culture: their way of seeing, their way of believing, their way of being. If Karl Marx had chosen to make Das Kapital a novel set in the Americas, he might have come out with a book something like this.” —Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove

“[Almanac of the Dead], both of its time and prescient, reflects an Indigenous conception of history as always simultaneously forming our present and future. Silko’s calling as a storyteller emerges from her grounding in the oral tradition of the Laguna Pueblo, though she also seeks common threads of thinking across tribal philosophies of the Americas, where in many cases time is understood as nonlinear . . . Silko noted with care the past that made her present, saw the lines of movement and force that yoked together racial violence, Indigenous dispossession, and the militarization of arbitrary political borders. . . . In 1991, a book like Almanac had never been produced in Native American literature, and nothing like it has been produced since.” —Lou Cornum, Lit Hub

“A masterwork of American literature, the most powerful, gripping novel I’ve read in years.” —Tony Hillerman

“It’s simply splendid, and I can’t stress too much how happy I am to have this book in the world.” —Toni Morrison

“One of the most ambitious literary undertakings of the past quarter century.” —The New Republic

“Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead is an extraordinary book, a work of immense creative power. Epic in scope, this is not something to take along for a weekend’s light reading. The book’s central theme is the clash of two civilizations—a clash which has persisted ever since the first Spaniards arrived in the Land of the Pueblos some 450 years ago. Almanac of the Dead is a landmark in Native American literature—the Indian War and Peace.” —Richard Erdoes, author of Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

“To read this book is to hear the voices of the ancestors and spirits telling us where we came from, who we are, and where we must go.” —Maxine Hong Kingston