War Dances

With bright insight into the minds of artists, entrepreneurs, fathers, husbands, and sons, Sherman Alexie populates his stories with ordinary men on the brink of exceptional change. In the tour-de-force title story, a son remembers his father slowly dying a "natural Indian death" from alcohol and diabetes, just as he learns that he himself may have a brain tumor. With "The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless," Alexie dissects a vintage clothing store owner's failing marriage and his subsequent courtship of a Puma-clad stranger in various airports across the country. And "Breaking and Entering" recounts a film editor's fateful confrontation with an adolescent who forcibly enters his house to steal his DVD collection.