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Paula Gunn Allen's

According to Cherokee legend, Grandmother Spider brought the light of intelligence and experience to the people. Spider Woman's Granddaughters, a superlative collection of traditional tales, biographical writings, and contemporary short stories, brings to the page the light of thought about the past and present lives of Native people. The storytellers represented here--who include Pretty Shield, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Anna Lee Walters, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Vickie Sears, and Mary TallMountain--are as varied in life-style, age, and attitude as in tribal and regional affiliation. Their stories are about love and death, poverty and pain, power politics and the power of the sacred.

One of the most striking features of Spider Woman's Granddaughters is the way in which the volume's richly varied stories embody the essential qualities of Native American aesthetics. As Paula Gunn Allen points out in the Introduction, Indian storytellers seldom write or speak as isolated individuals, cut off from their communal context. Rather, they use their tales to entertain, enlighten, educate, and above all to reveal to the audience their connection to the wisdom and experience of the tribal group. In this way the continuity between daily life and the tribal matrix is reaffirmed, and the audience's participation in the sacred life of the group and of the universe gains an added dimension.

Spider Woman's Granddaughters speaks powerfully to all readers, Native and non-Native alike. While the stories make clear that the experience of Native American women is in some ways unique, they show us, just as clearly, how that experience is also universal-one of the many ways of being human in our bewildering frightening, and beautiful modern world.

Paula Gunn Allen is a Laguna Pueblo/Sioux Indian and one of the foremost Native American scholars and literary critics. She is the author of Skins and Bones and six other books of poetry, the novel The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, and the critically acclaimed volume of essays The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition. She is professor of Native American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"This is a wide-ranging and absorbing collection of stories which brilliantly dramatizes the genealogy of the tales told by such fine contemporary writers as Louise Erdrich and Linda Hogan. As Paula Gunn Allen shows us, the miraculous SpiderWoman still lives in the blood of her granddaughters."

--Sandra M. Gilbert, Princeton University

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