Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the most important writers to emerge from the Native American Renaissance, a period of intense literary productivity by Native Americans that began with the 1968 publication of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn. When Silko's first novel, Ceremony, appeared in 1977, she had already established a reputation for her lyrical, tightly written short stories, many of which were anthologized in The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians (1974) and for her collection Laguna Woman: Poems, published the same year. Ceremony, the story of a World War II veteran's return home to Laguna Pueblo, was only the third novel by a Native American woman to be published in the United States. Since its publication, Ceremony has grown steadily in popularity and critical acclaim; considered a foundational text of Native American literature, it remains the work for which Silko...