Ramadan blues / Wajahat Ali -- Imagine my life / Jimmy Santiago Baca -- The guinea pig lady / Russell Banks -- The poorest boy in Chicago / Mitch Berman -- Berlin disco inferno / Cecil Brown -- Wormwood / Conyus (Calhoun) -- The day the Cisco Kid shot John Wayne / Nash Candelaria -- Backcity transit by day / Wanda Coleman -- Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl / Robert Coover -- Insidiuos disease / Lucha Corpi -- Dream a dream of me / Stanley Crouch -- Pirate one / Fielding Dawson -- Night of the FEMA trailers / Vivian Demuth -- The lynching of Jube Benson / Paul Laurence Dunbar -- The stones of the village / Alice Dunbar-Nelson -- I look out for Ed Wolfe / Stanley Elkin -- For white men only / James T. Farrell -- Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the slave trade / Benjamin Franklin -- Big bug / Ellen Geist -- Giant rat / Anna Nelson Harry -- The dry mountain air / Robert Hass -- Let's go, Israel / Hillel Heinstein -- Cables / Roberta Hill -- The Clochard / Chester Himes -- Who's passing for who? / Langston Hughes -- Debut / Kristin Hunter -- Sweat / Zora Neale Hurston -- The father and the son / Yuri Kageyama -- Moses mama / William Melvin Kelley -- God bless America / John O. Killens -- Vol de nuit / Susanne Lee -- Thin / Minjon LeNoir-Irwin -- Geography one / Russell Charles Leong -- Black Korea 2 / Walter K. Lew -- Reena / Paule Marshall -- Gold Coast / James Alan McPherson -- The day they went shopping / Nancy Mercado -- A wife's story / Bharati Mukherjee -- Boy on a wooden horse / Alejandro Murguía -- Tales left untold / Aphrodite Désirée Navab -- Guilt payment / Ty Pak -- Goodbye and good luck / Grace Paley -- Buzzards celebrate predation's end / Ishmael Reed -- Mice / Danny Romero -- The funeral / Corie Rosen -- Manny / Floyd Salas -- Lynching for profit / George S. Schuyler -- The mulatto / Victor Séjour -- aw, babee, you so pretty / Ntozake Shange -- Decoy / Ray Smith -- Miss Furr and Miss Skeene / Gertrude Stein -- The sombrero / Leon Surmelian -- Naaholooyah / Mary TallMountain -- The war prayer / Mark Twain -- Harold Ball / E. Donald Two-Rivers -- Panic portage / Gerald Vizenor -- Son in the afternoon / John A. Williams -- My brother at the Canadian border / Sholeh Wolpé -- A new day / Charles Wright -- Shirley Temple, hotcha-cha / Wakako Yamauchi -- The homecoming / Frank Yerby -- Going for the moon / Al Young -- The last dream / Edgardo Vega Yunqué.
Summary:
Using the yardstick that a short story is any fiction under 15,000 words, Ishmael Reed-- with the assistance of Carla Blank-- has assembled an anthology that reexamines the history of the form across a broader, more inclusive spectrum. The result is a collection that stretches the boundaries of the American literary landscape, including work ranging from animal stories of the Northwest Coast Eyaks to African-American folklore to reflections on the American Muslim experience. Pow Wow is the sequel to Reed's From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002, a volume that included both Tupac Shakur and T. S. Eliot, and was named one of the best poetry anthologies of 2003 by Library Journal. Its fiction-focused follow-up once again demonstrates the broad range of American writing, from such stellar names as Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Russell Banks, and Alejandro Murguía to newly discovered writers of all races, genders, and backgrounds. By presenting many different sides to the American story, the fiction of these writers challenges official history, shatters accepted myths, and provides alternatives to mainstream notions of personal and national identity. Gathering these voices together, Pow Wow offers a fascinating and vital opportunity to traverse the fault lines that separate, distinguish, and define a nation made of many Americas.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.