St. Andrew's "Healing The Witchery: Medicine in Silko's Ceremony," printed in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 44, No 1, discusses the Pueblo cos mology in greater detail. This is a good article for further investigating the underlying religious and cultural themes of the novel.

After ten years of work, Silko published her second novel, Almanac of the Dead This novel is more overtly political and reflects the hysteria surrounding illegal immigration, drug running, the CIA, and other phenomena of the 1980s. Like Ceremony, legends are interwoven with the present day as an ancient book is pieced back together after being smuggled out of the clutches of the book burning Spanish.

Silko corrects some mistakes about her own biography and gives insights into her work in a book of essays, Yello Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996). In this collection, she tells of her...