Rereading Ishi’s Story offers a manifesto of sorts through a critical reading of an anthropological classic, Theodora Kroeber’s 1961 book, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. The heart of the analysis involves a five-play cycle, built around Gerald Vizenor’s trickster-survivance model. It gives Ishi a voice he never had in Kroeber’s book and imagines an Ishi who was not the happy warrior in Kroeber’s book. The author follows the story line in Kroeber’s book, focusing on key events as recounted by Alfred Kroeber and his associates Saxton Pope and Thomas Waterman. Chapter 1 tells Ishi’s story in his own words; Chapter 2 retells Ishi’s capture narrative, which includes the recording of his story of the wood ducks; Chapter 3 builds on stories told about Ishi by Zumwalt Jr.; Chapter 4 criticizes Kroeber and associates for making Ishi return to his homeland, asking him to ‘play’ Indian; and Chapter 5 takes up his death and the recovery of his brain. The concluding chapters address repatriation practices, genocide, Indigenous ethics, discourses of forgiveness, and a performance autoethnography ethic for this new century, returning to the Kroebers and their autoethnographic practices. This book continues a four-volume project on Native Americans, the postmodern Wild West shows, museums, violence, genocide, and the modern U.S. American use of the Native American in a collective search for an authentic identity (Denzin, 2015, 2013, 2011, 2008). It will be of great interest to scholars and students of qualitative inquiry, anthropology, and Native American studies.

Originally published: 1961. With new foreword.

From the mountains of California to a forgotten steel vat at the Smithsonian, this "eloquent and soul-searching book" (Lit) is "a compelling account of one of American anthropology's strangest, saddest chapters" (Archaeology). After the Yahi were massacred in the mid-nineteenth century, Ishi survived alone for decades in the mountains of northern California, wearing skins and hunting with bow and arrow. His capture in 1911 made him a national sensation; anthropologist Alfred Kroeber declared him the world's most "uncivilized" man and made Ishi a living exhibit in his museum. Thousands came to see the displaced Indian before his death, of tuberculosis. Ishi's Brain follows Orin Starn's gripping quest for the remains of the last of the Yahi.

Jack London has long been recognized as one of the most colorful figures in American literature. He is America’s most widely translated author (into more than eighty languages), and although his works have been neglected until recently by academic critics in the United States, he is finally winning recognition as a major figure in American literary history. The breadth and depth of new critical study of London’s work in recent decades attest to his newfound respectability. London criticism has moved beyond a traditional concerns of realism and naturalism as well as beyond the timeworn biographical focus to engage such theoretical approaches as race, gender, class, post-structuralism, and new historicism. The range and intellectual energy of the essays collected here give the reader a new sense of London’s richness and variety, especially his treatment of diverse cultures. Having in the past focused more on London’s personal "world,” we are now afforded an opportunity to look more closely at his art and the numerous worlds it uncovers.

A monumentally devastating plague leaves only a few survivors who, while experiencing dreams of a battle between good and evil, move toward an actual confrontation as they migrate to Boulder, Colorado.

An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas’ house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end. Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the US in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan’s great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.

Leading scholars speculate on the postmodern aspects of modernist literature