Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. LARRY McMURTRY is the author of twenty-eight novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. She is the recipient of a five-year MacArthur Foundation grant.

She is the author of the novel Almanac of the Dead, and her stories have appeared in many magazines and collections (including Writers of the Purple Sage). She grew up in the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, where she lives with her husband and two children. LESLIE MARMON SILKO was born in Albuquerque in 1948 of mixed ancestry-Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white. Leslie Marmon Silko now lives on a ranch near Tucson, Arizona.Įxcerpt. Nevertheless, it was the singular achievement of Ceremony that first secured her a place among the first rank of Native American novelists. 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. 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.

In 1973, Silko moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she wrote Ceremony. 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 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 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. Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears.

Leslie silko ceremony