Bad Banana

  Potent stories that offer a forceful vision of contemporary Navajo life, by an American Book Award winner  An ex-con hired to fix up a school bus for a couple living off the grid in the desert finds himself in the middle of their tattered relationship. An electrician's plan to take his young nephew on a hike in the mountains, as a break from the motel room where they live, goes awry thanks to an untrustworthy new coworker. A night custodian makes the mistake of revealing too much about his work at a medical research facility to a girl who shares his passion for death metal. A relapsing addict struggles to square his desire for a white woman he meets in a writing class with family expectations and traditions. Set in and around Flagstaff, the stories in Sinking Bell depict violent collisions of love, cultures, and racism. In his gritty and searching fiction debut, Bojan Louis draws empathetic portraits of day laborers, metalheads, motel managers, aspiring writ...

  “ The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature is extraordinary. It is the beauty of Diné bizaad from Creation’s horizon—K'é breath, heart, continuance—beyond measure. I advise it be read with and for Humility, Courage, Sustenance, Gratitude—always for the people, community, and land that is the source of Existence.”—Simon J. Ortiz “This collection is like sitting in a circle with those Diné writers and poets who have long inspired many of us, especially those of us who grew up writing and listening in the Southwest, in the territory influenced by four sacred mountains that bear symbolic and literal significance to all things and thoughts Diné. In the inspirational gathering in these pages, we can hear many voices and feel how the land rises up beneath to embrace us with knowledge and beauty, and how it continues across the horizon to meet the sky. These voices include crucial roots of American literature. The publication of Blackhorse Mitchell’s Miracle Hill ...