Collection: War Dances

Overview
Sherman Alexie's War Dances (2009) is a rangy, quick-shifting collection that blends short stories, flash nonfiction, poems, and hybrid pieces into a portrait of contemporary American life seen through Native and mixed-heritage experiences. The book moves with a stand-up comic's timing and a poet's compression, toggling between elegy and punchline. Bodies fail, families fracture and reconcile, and the buzz of pop culture, news media, and consumer life hums through every room. Winner of the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the collection stakes out a territory where grief and satire coexist, and where intimacy is most often forged in moments of fear, illness, or absurd misrecognition.

Form and Voice
Alexie arranges the book as a collage. Conventional short stories sit beside prose poems, mock interviews, medical questionnaires, found-footage riffs, and lyric interludes. The shifts in form mirror the instability of memory and identity; a line of verse will suddenly widen into anecdote, then fracture into a joke, then swivel toward an epiphany. The narrators, frequently first-person and often artists, fathers, sons, or all three, speak in a quicksilver voice that refuses sentimentality even as it courts tenderness. This formal restlessness lets the book pivot rapidly across tones, holding contradiction without apology.

Themes
War Dances revolves around illness, mortality, and inheritance. Fathers age, bodies go numb, hearing fails, and tumors appear like unwanted prophecies. The title sequence links a narrator's sudden hearing loss to his father's failing health, creating a call-and-response between personal fragility and familial fate. Alcoholism, diabetes, and the long aftereffects of trauma, historical and domestic, thread through the book, set against America’s relentless background noise of advertising, TV, and smartphones. Alexie probes masculinity with unusual frankness: bravado hides fear; cruelty and tenderness wrestle in the same sentence. The collection is equally preoccupied with race and perception, how stories get told about Native people, how other communities are misread, and how media narratives flatten complexity into spectacle.

Notable Pieces
"Breaking and Entering" follows a Native American video editor who kills a Black teenager during a nighttime break-in at his Seattle home. The act, legally justified yet morally unquiet, detonates a wave of public judgment and private disintegration. The narrator’s professional life, editing footage of other people’s crises, becomes a mirror for how violence is cut, framed, and consumed. The story refuses clean absolution, instead lingering in the messy overlap of fear, culpability, marriage, and race.

The title work, “War Dances,” braids comic self-diagnosis with bedside vigil. The narrator’s medical scares and his father’s decline generate a sequence of micro-scenes, hospital corridors, thrift-store errands, remembered jokes, that accumulate into a love letter edged with anger. The piece exemplifies the book’s method: pain rendered with antic humor, humor sharpened by the certainty of loss.

Style and Tone
Alexie’s sentences are athletic and unguarded, full of pivoting clauses and sucker-punch endings. He raids high and low registers alike, grafting pop references to intimate confession. The poems function as palate cleansers and pressure valves, short, incantatory riffs that distill the prose’s preoccupations into image and rhythm. Refrains recur across genres, especially the impulse to make a joke at the worst possible moment, as if laughter could buy one more minute of grace.

Scope and Significance
Taken together, War Dances maps the uneasy choreography of American belonging. It asks who gets to narrate pain, how humor can be both shield and weapon, and what survives when the body does not. Its hybrid form makes the argument that no single genre can hold the contradictions of contemporary life. The result is compact yet far-reaching, a book that tilts between stand-up set and bedside prayer while keeping faith with the complicated, persistent music of family, tribe, and self.