Also this issue:

Worlds of Wonder
“Cabinets of Curiosities” is a magical journey through time and spaces.
-Robin Rice

20/20 Vision
Snyderman Gallery celebrates 20 years in the furniture business.
-Lori Hill

“A Night at the Casbah”
-Lori Hill

Baseball panel discussion
-Andrew Milner

Louis Faurer: A Photographic Retrospective
-John Vettese

Bloomsday Celebration
-Lori Hill

Frankie Avalon
-Interview by A.D. Amorosi

A Picasso
-David Anthony Fox

June 12-18, 2003

artpicks

Sherman Alexie

by John Freeman

He is the world's four-time heavyweight poetry-slam champ. He directs and writes films, including the recent The Business of Fancydancing, winner of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival Audience Award. And now he's also a stand-up comic. Without a doubt, at just 36 years of age, Sherman Alexie has become American literature's most versatile showman. And for good reason: Alexie might be the only short-story writer alive today who can make audiences wet their pants with laughter.

The good is news is that Alexie's show comes to Philadelphia this week, with a reading from his most recent book, Ten Little Indians. A play off the racist nursery rhyme, the stories in this new collection chip away at Indian stereotypes by presenting a range of characters, none of whom live on a reservation or drink themselves silly. Instead, he writes of Indians who are successful urban professionals, yet find themselves alienated both from the mainstream and their reservation roots.

Alexie, who grew up on a Spokane reservation until he began attending a white high school, knows well the pain of being between two cultures, belonging to neither of them. Most often, he deals with such emotions by lambasting them with humor, as in "Can I Get a Witness," where an unhappily married Indian woman chuckles at her husband's knee-jerk patriotism, "How could any Indian put on an U.S. military uniform and not die of toxic irony?"

Sherman Alexie, Wed., June 18, 6 p.m., free, Borders Books, Broad and Chestnut sts., 215-568-7400.