Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

                 Required Reading In a Time Magazine interview, Sherman Alexie mocks himself when he says, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought back in 1987: What’s going to make me really economically successful? Poems about Indian guys. I’m a capitalistic genius,” yet the joke is actually real. Alexie has had a lot of success writing about Indian guys. Taking stories from his earlier works, he’s added a few, shaken well, then published this collection: Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories , and I'd call it required reading. Some of the characters draw on Alexie's own history: hydrocephalus, basketball, complicated father/son relationships, living on the reservation, and leaving it behind. Many of the characters appear in multiple stories; themes crop up again and again; and through it all you see his sense of humor, his struggles with alcoholism, and his willingness to tackle reservation life that mark this as clearly a bo...