Product Description: Through a professional story-teller's sometimes humorous commentary on culture and literature from The Odyssey on , the book suggests that literature is not an artifact to be studied but a living process. Often irreverent, crossing literary and scholarly lines, Penn aims to discover what literature does for an imaginatively engaged reader...read more

Product Description: The noted Nez Perce fiction writer and critic W. S. Penn turns his wry and penetrating gaze on the state of modern Native life and literature and considers how modern scholarship has affected the ways Natives and others see themselves and their world...read more

Product Description: Young Pal needs help with his dreaming. Palimony Blue Larue, a mixblood growing up in a small California town, suffers from a painful shyness and wants more than anything to be liked. That's why Mary Blue, his Nez Perce mother, has dreamed the weyekin, the spirit guide, to help her bring into the world the one lasting love her son needs to overcome the diffidence that runs so deep in his blood...read more

Product Description: In this first collection of short fiction, renowned American Indian writer W. S. Penn reveals a writing life that has been both difficult and fortunate. Penn has moved away from conventional narrative methods, through what his own oral tradition encompasses, to arrive at telling stories as they must be told as opposed to the ways they might be told...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Featuring never-before-published material, The Telling of the World contains legends and stories from many Native American nations collected from both traditional and contemporary sources. These inspirational tales follow the path of life--from creation and birth, through adolescnce, love and marriage, to death and the renewal of the spirit...read more

Product Description: The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A "mixblood," according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The customary cant about being an American Indian goes like this: Indians must live in wide open spaces; they must define their spirituality by chant, dance, and drum; they must pass down their traditions with reverent care; and they must offer tourists Indian art and Indian experiences to take home...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The narrator-protagonist of this magical novel about urban mixed-blood Indian life is Albert (Alley) Hummingbird, a self-conscious, shy college student who masks his feelings with humor and who longs to reconcile the two cultures that have formed him...read more