About this Event
The Indigenous Voices Book Club is devoted to reading and discussing books by Indigenous writers, bringing together fiction, memoir, history, poetry, and more. Each month, we'll encounter stories and perspectives that deepen our understanding of Indigenous experiences, histories, cultures, and contemporary life.
This month, we're reading Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony—a landmark of Native American literature about a young Laguna Pueblo man trying to find his way home after World War II. Tayo returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation carrying memories of the war, the death of his cousin Rocky, and a deep sense that he no longer belongs anywhere. Neither the doctors who treated him nor the familiar routines of home seem able to reach him. His search for healing instead leads him toward ceremony, stories, the land, and an understanding of his place within something much older and larger than himself. Silko moves between prose, poetry, memory, and traditional stories, allowing past and present to speak to one another rather than keeping them neatly separated. First published in 1977, Ceremony is a novel about war and its aftermath, but also about storytelling itself: how stories hold knowledge, how they change as the world changes, and how finding your way back to them can become a way of finding your way back to yourself.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
More than thirty-five years since its original publication, Ceremonyremains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a ceremony of healing. Tayo, a World War II veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. He is deeply scarred by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese and further wounded by the rejection he encounters from his people. Only by immersing himself in the Indian past can he begin to regain the peace that was taken from him. Masterfully written, filled with the somber majesty of Pueblo myth, Ceremony is a work of enduring power. The Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition contains a new preface by the author and an introduction by Larry McMurtry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Leslie Marmon Silko was born in New Mexico in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including Ceremony, Storyteller, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes, and The Turquoise Ledge. Considered by many as one of the most important contemporary Native American writers, Silko’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” fellowship, the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for significant contribution to American literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime achievement by a writer whose work focuses on the American West. She has been named a Living Cultural Treasure by the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Council, and has also received the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award.
Event venue & nearby stays
Bookstore1Sarasota, 117 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, United States
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