Almanac of the Dead - by Leslie Marmon Silko (Paperback)

About the Book

In its extraordinary range of character and culture, Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale. The acclaimed author of Ceremony has undertaken a weaving of ideas and lives, fate and history, passion and conquest in an attempt to re-create the moral history of the Americas, told from the point of view of the conquered, not the conquerors.

Book Synopsis

"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

From critically acclaimed author Leslie Marmon Silko, an epic novel about people caught between two cultures and two times: the modern-day Southwest, and the places of the old ones, the native peoples of the Americas

In its extraordinary range of character and culture, Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale, a brilliant, haunting, and tragic novel of ruin and resistance in the Americas. At the heart of this story is Seese, an enigmatic survivor of the fast-money, high-risk world of drug dealing--a world in which the needs of modern America exist in a dangerous balance with Native American traditions. Seese has been drawn back to the Southwest in search of her missing child. In Tuscon, she encounters Lecha, a well-known psychic who is hiding from the consequences of her celebrity. Lecha's larger duty is to transcribe the ancient, painfully preserved notebooks that contain the history of her own people--a Native American Almanac of the Dead.

Through the violent lives of Lecha's extended familiy, a many-layered narrative unfolds to tell the magnificent, tragic, and unforgettable story of the 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.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in New Mexico in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including Ceremony, Storyteller, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes, and The Turquoise Ledge. Considered by many as one of the most important contemporary Native American writers, Silko's honors include a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" fellowship, the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for significant contribution to American literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime achievement by a writer whose work focuses on the American West. She has been named a Living Cultural Treasure by the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Council, and has also received the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award.