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5th Avenue Theatre
Februay 2, 1998
Biographies
Excerpts
Selected Works
Links
Sherman
Alexie
Like any young writer who makes a striking entrance onto the literary
scene, Sherman Alexie has drawn comparisons. He is the Jack Kerouac of
reservation life for his chronicling of points high and low of contemporary
Indian life—the despair, the self-destructiveness, the snares of
the system, the simple pleasures of basketball, and dancing. Born in 1966,
Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian who grew up in Wellpinit, a small
town on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Alexie devoured books throughout
his youth, developed a fiercely competitive style in the classroom, and
had his nose broken five times for being the smart kid. After two years
at Gonzaga University, Alexie transferred to Washington State University
where he graduated in 1991. He was still a student at WSU when his first
manuscript of poetry, I Would Steal Horses (1992), was accepted
for publication. "I have a very specific commitment to Indian people,"
said Alexie, "and I'm very tribal in that sense. I want us to survive
as Indians."
Christina Garcia
An entrancing and lively storyteller, Christina Garcia was born in Havana
in 1958—a year before Castro rose to power—and immigrated with
her family to New York City in 1960—a year prior to the Bay of Pigs
invasion. Though her vita speaks to her experience as an American (Barnard
College, B.A., 1979; John Hopkins University, M.A., 1981; reporter, correspondent,
and Miami bureau chief, Time magazine, throughout the '80s), her
fiction resonates with the themes of her Cuban heritage. Garcia explained
to an interviewer: "I grew up with a very bifurcated sense of myself.
I worked to develop an American side, with my Cuban side being more private."
In her 30s, however, she was struck by her affinity to her homeland: "I
became incorrigibly Cuban. It sort of hit me retroactively, this identity
thing."
Gish Jen
Lillian (Gish) Jen was born in 1955 in New York City, raised in Scarsdale,
and educated at Harvard (B.A., 1977), Stanford (attended business school),
and Iowa's Writer's Workshop (MFA, 1983). Despite her own efforts to settle
into a more secure career, Jen became a writer against her parents' wishes,
assuming her pen name from the actress Lillian Gish.
Her first book, Typical American (1991), reveals how easily one
can fall prey to the seductions of wealth and consumerism when "the
sky's the limit." Yet readers should think broadly: "I hope
Typical American will be viewed not only as an immigrant story
but as a story for all Americans, to make us think about what our myths
and realities are," said Jen. "We are not a country that likes
to think in terms of limits."
David Foster Wallace
Born in 1962, he was raised in Illinois. He graduated from Amherst College
(1985), where he was, in his words, "a math weenie," received
his so-called "master of flatulent arts" from the University
of Arizona (1987), and studied philosophy at Harvard. Right out of the
blocks, he received national recognition for his first novel, The Broom
of the System (1987), and since that time has been appointed heir
to the high comic tradition of Jonathan Swift. Among many honors awarded,
Wallace was a recipient of a 1997 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. One
thread of David Foster Wallace's inventive, kaleidoscopic is his 1,079-page
novel Infinite Jest (1996). Says Wallace of his rigorous novel:
"In a time of unprecedented comfort and pleasure and ease, there
was a real sort of sadness about the country. I wanted to do something
about it, about America and what our children might think of us. That's
one reason for setting the book 18 years ahead." A professor of English
at Illinois State University, he resides in Normal, Illinois.
From Indian Killer (1996), by Sherman
Alexie
John shook her hand again and waved as she pulled away. He stood there
in the dark for a while, as cars filled with strangers passed him by,
as the night sky became so clear that every constellation was visible.
The Big and Little Dippers, Orion, Pegasus. John knew that stars were
suns, that each was the center of its own solar system, with any number
of planets dependent on its warmth and gravity. John, a falling star,
brief and homeless, began the long walk back to Seattle, wondering what
Olivia and Daniel would think of this adventure. Pragmatic people. When
they swallowed the bread and wine at Mass, did they ever consider the
magic of it all? There was magic in the world. John knew that real Indians
felt it every day. He had only brief glimpses of it, small miracles happening
at the edges of his peripheral vision, tiny wonders exploding while his
back was turned.
From The Agüero Sisters (1997), by Christina Garcia
Last month, she awoke and discovered that her mother's face had replaced
her own. Since then Constancia has slept only four hours a night, and
her energy has increased to an exhilarating degree. She finds the soft
stretch of Mamá's flesh over hers oddly sustaining, as if she were
buoyed by a warm tidal power. Still, Constancia's moods pendulate unpredictable,
from this sense of contentment to an uncontrollable desire to scratch
off her face. She wonders how long she must carry her mother's visage,
shoulder the burden of Mamá's youth in full bloom (she was thirty-four
when she died in the Zapata Swamp) alongside her own midlife perspective.
What penance this is: to wear Mamá's mouth, her eyes, like a spiteful
inheritance, to suffer the countenance that scorned her, that banished
her to a lonely childhood of uncles and horses. And the question persists:
Where has her own face fled?
From Mona in the Promised Land (1996), by Gish Jen
Seth Mandel is a shortish, bright-eyed, pony-tailed guy, with big broad
shoulders and the surprise domestic side you associate with primates like
the silverback gorilla. Not only is he the type to offer people back rubs
of surprising penetration, but he'll pick a piece of lint off your sleeve
if he sees it, saying, Excuse me, I can't help it; I'm driven by early
training and the force of neurosis. And then his eyes will crinkle, and
a crack will open in his red-brown beard, and you'll know he's smiling
his wide crooked smile. He doesn't laugh much--the enigmatic smile is
more his style. But once in a while, he'll let out a guffaw, shocking
people, and then he will smile to see their reaction. For this is what
he likes more than anything, to conduct little experiments--or as he puts
it, to send up balloons. This is how you see the wind. That is, if you
are interested in seeing the wind. He smiles again."
From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), by David
Foster Wallace
Right now it's Saturday 18 March, and I'm sitting in the extremely full
coffee shop of the Fort Lauderdale Airport, killing the four hours between
when I had to be off the cruise ship and when my flight to Chicago leaves
by trying to summon up a kind of hypnotic sensuous collage of all the
stuff I've seen and heard and done as a result of the journalistic assignment
just ended. I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue.
I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled
what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21,000 pounds of hot flesh.
I have been addressed as 'Mon' in three different nations. I have watched
500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that
looked computer-enhanced and a tropical moon that looked more like a sort
of obscenely large and dangling lemon than like the good old stony U.S.
moon I'm used to. I have (very briefly) joined a Conga Line.
Selected
works of Sherman Alexie
The Business of Fancydancing (1992)
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)
Reservation Blues (1995)
Indian Killer (1996)
The Toughest Indian in the World (2000)
Selected works of Christina Garcia
Dreaming in Cuban (1992)
The Agüero Sisters (1997)
Selected works of Gish Jen
Typical American (1991)
Mona in the Promised Land (1996)
Who's Irish? : Stories (1999)
Selected works of David Foster Wallace
The Broom of the System (1987)
Girl with Curious Hair (1989)
Infinite Jest (1996)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)
Web
Site Links
Alexie's official web site
Reading group guide
for Garcia's The Agüero Sisters
Powell's Books interview
with Jen
Salon.com interview
with Wallace
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