The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto

Part murder mystery, part declaration of independence, The Bird is Gone: a Manifesto takes Native American writing where it has never gone before—into a future where the Dakotas are Indian Territory again. The Traditionals now cling to their microwaves, while the Progressives live on the grassland with the buffalo. Inside a bowling alley called Fool's Hip, Special Agent Chassis Jones is questioning Nickel Eye about thirty-nine tourists who have gone missing. Everybody in the place is listening: Mary Boy, the Jesus tattoo on his arm still bleeding; Cat Stand, about to peel off her last undershirt; Back Iron, checking the run in his nylons, and LP Deal who, in spite of the AllSkin tournament under way and the swarm of anthropologists at the border, is writing it all down.

"In The Bird is Gone, Stephen Graham Jones follows his brilliant first novel, The Fast Red Road, with another work of pure originality and quirky brilliance. No unintended clichés or stereotypes here. With Vizenor-like deftness and completely unexpected moves, Jones is taking Native American fiction in a new, necessary direction. We see a literature coming of age in these pages."

—Louis Owens

"The Bird is Gone is the one of the most strikingly original novels I've read in a long, long time. And yet, extraordinarily, its originality never overwhelms its humanity. What a thrill it is to see the world through Stephen Jones's sensibility. He is unquestionably one of our finest young writers."

—Robert Olen Butler

"For a while now I have felt that we Native American writers (and I most certainly include myself in the "we") keep writing about the same damn things. Stephen Jones writes with a whole new aesthetic and moral sense. He doesn't sound like any of the rest of us, and I love that. "

—Sherman Alexie