The best stories create traditions, and this novel by celebrated Native American writer Gerald Vizenor is a marvelous conjunction of trickster stories and literary ingenuity. Chair of Tears is funny, fierce, ironic, and deadly serious, a sendup of sacred poses, cultural pretensions, and familiar places from reservations to universities. The novel begins with generous stories about Captain Eighty, his young wife, the poker-playing genius named Quiver, and their children and grandchildren who live on a rustic houseboat. 

Captain Shammer, an extraordinary grandson reared on the houseboat and with no formal education, is appointed the chairman of a troubled Department of Native American Indian Studies at a prominent university. Shammer is a natural enterpriser and ironic showman in the tradition of trickster stories. He arrives at the first faculty meeting dressed in the uniform of Gen. George Armstrong Custer. Native students celebrate his conversion of the department into an academic poker parlor and casino, and a panic radio station. The most sensational enterprise is the training of service mongrels to detect the absence of irony. 

An irresistible novel of original ideas, Chair of Tears gets to the heart of questions about identity politics, multiculturalism, pedantry, and timely virtues.

Gerald Vizenor is Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author and editor of more than thirty books, including Hiroshima Bugi (available in a Bison Books edition) and, most recently, the novel Shrouds of White Earth.

 

 

"An intriguing, fun, and intelligent read."—Publishers Weekly

"The gullibility of cultural studies departments is an easy target for satire and, after a long and distinguished career of activism and teaching, Gerald Vizenor has surely earned the right to poke as many academic eyes as he wants. . . . [Chair of Tears is] often bitterly funny, proving once again that this seasoned provocateur has the irony dogs well under his command."—Shelf Awareness

Praise for Gerald Vizenor’s novel Hiroshima Bugi

“Vizenor has a reputation for taking chances with his novels, for pushing the form in new directions. He outdoes himself in his latest. . . . Readers who have shared other adventures with Vizenor will not be disappointed.”—Library Journal

“Vizenor is at full speed in Hiroshima Bugi. This book is a natural dance of concepts. Vizenor does for Native literature what James Joyce does for Irish literature in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.”—Diane Glancy, author of Designs of the Night Sky

“Vizenor offers us another sophisticated, alternately sensitive and ironic meditation on the importance of cross-fertilization and remembrance.”—Thomas Hove, Review of Contemporary Fiction