Ceremony by Leslie Silko

Ceremony by Leslie Silko

Focuses on the lives of young indian veterans home from the war, including Taya, a halfbred whose imprisonment by the Japanese has left him shattered. This novel follows his struggle against alcoholism and despair and his ritual search for meaning in the ancient Indian stories and traditions.

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She has said that her writing has at its core the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or mixed-blood person. As she grew up on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, she learned the stories and culture of the Laguna people from her great-grandmother and other female relatives. After receiving her B. A. in English at the University of New Mexico, she enrolled in the University of New Mexico law school but completed only three semesters before deciding that writing and storytelling, not law, were the means by which she could best promote justice. She married John Silko in 1970. Prior to the writing of Ceremony, she published a series of short stories, including The Man to Send Rain Clouds. She also authored a volume of poetry, Laguna Woman: Poems, for which she received the Pushcart Prize for Poetry.

In 1973, Silko moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she wrote Ceremony. Initially conceived as a comic story abut a mother's attempts to keep her son, a war veteran, away from alcohol, Ceremony gradually transformed into an intricate meditation on mental disturbance, despair, and the power of stories and traditional culture as the keys to self-awareness and, eventually, emotional healing. Having battled depression herself while composing her novel, Silko was later to call her book a ceremony for staying sane. Silko has followed the critical success of Ceremony with a series of other novels, including Storyteller, Almanac for the Dead, and Gardens in the Dunes. Nevertheless, it was the singular achievement of Ceremony that first secured her a place among the first rank of Native American novelists. Leslie Marmon Silko now lives on a ranch near Tucson, Arizona.

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-one bestselling novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show. He lives in Texas.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780140086836
ISBN 10	0140086838
Title	Ceremony
Author	Leslie Silko
Series	Contemporary American Fiction
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Pearson Education Limited
Year published	2000-04-13
Number of pages	262
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable