Pow Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience

Using the yardstick that a short story is any fiction under 15,000 words, Ishmael Reed—with the assistance of Carla Blank—has assembled an anthology that includes work ranging from animal stories of the Northwest Coast Eyaks to African-American folklore to reflections on the American Muslim experience. Pow-Wow is the sequel to Reed’s From Totems to A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900 –2002 , a volume that included both Tupac Shakur and T. S. Eliot, and was named one of the best poetry anthologies of 2003 by Library Journal . Its fiction-focused follow-up once again demonstrates the broad range of American writing, from such stellar names as Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Russell Banks, and Alejandro Murguía to newly discovered writers of all races, genders, and backgrounds. This landmark collection Zora Neale Hurston, Chester Himes, Robert Coover, Bharati Mukherjee, Benjamin Franklin, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Ntozake Shange, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mark Twain, Grace Paley, Russell Charles Leong, Charles Wright, James Alan McPherson, and more.