This thoroughly original volume collects three short stories and a powerful novella. Glancy's tales of Native American life explore that essential American territory, the border-between: between past and present, between native and immigrant cultures, between self and society.
The novella, Monkey Secret, combines traditional Native American storytelling and contemporary narrative techniques to explore the coming of age of a young girl of mixed race and heritage in rural northern Arkansas. Jean Pierce narrates her passage from childhood to maturity with typically Native American circularity and digression. Each chapter of Monkey Secret is like a single perfect bead on a string; Jean's impressionistic vignettes - growing up with her extended family at their farm in Haran, Arkansas, spending summers at the cabin on Bull Shoals Lake, departing for college and returning to find her mother ill - are threaded with the twin strands of her complex culture and her desperate love for her cousin Cedric.
Jacket art: The Lake by Gerardo Dottori.
ISBN 0-88101-5016-6, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1995
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