'Alexie's War Dances is a deserving winner of this year's PEN/Faulkner award for fiction ... It's brilliant. You'll just have to read it and see.'

(The Age)

'... a collection that is at once darkly witty and oddly tender, sophisticated yet conversationally direct, and which, perhaps appropriately, is both a brilliant performance by a writer in full command of his powers and a deeply personal dissection of the illusions of masculinity.'

James Bradley (Sydney Morning Herald)

'Sherman Alexie, like our own Christos Tsiolkas, writes entertaining, poignant and darkly funny stories that interrogate race, class and social politics in astonishingly original ways. The stories in War Dances are interspersed with poems and the inventiveness of this idea is reflected in the stories themselves ... An amazing read.'

'**2010 Standout Read**', Jo Case (The Big Issue )

'How satisfying it is to see a writer achieve that elusive marriage of style and substance that gives a work of fiction its power. Native American writer Sherman Alexie has clearly come of age in this collection of stories and poems, which contain all of his trademark literary bravura and energy but are infused with a more mature and often bittersweet wisdom about the world. These pieces are full of labourers, artists, fathers, husbands and sons ordinary men whose dilemmas take us somewhere close to the heart of what it means to be human.'

Alice Nelson (Weekend West)

‘From National Book Award–winner Alexie comes a new collection of stories, poems, question and answer sequences, and hybrids of all three and beyond. In a penetrating voice that mixes humor with anger, Alexie pointedly asks, If it is true that children pay for the sins of their fathers, then is it also true that fathers pay for the sins of their children? ... a spiritedly provocative array of tragic comedies.’

(Publishers Weekly)

'This US writer sure knows how to capture deep emotion. Lust, grief, longing and shame rise off the page as ordinary men struggle with everyday life ... This is a compassionate, witty portrayal of people struggling with their limitations.'

(Herald Sun)

'Sherman Alexie is a rare creature in contemporary literature, a writer who can make you laugh as easily as he can make you cry. He’s also frighteningly versatile, as a poet, screenwriter, short story author, and novelist.'

(The Salt Lake Tribune)

'Remarkable ... Wonderful ... [Alexie’s] work reveals both the light and dark within native American life. A paradox in his writing is that you can be in the middle of delighted laughter when he will hit you with a sentence so true to the core of a character’s pain that you suck your breath or are startled to realize you are crying.'

(The Globe and Mail)

'Encounter [Alexie’s work] once and you’ll never forget it.'

(Library Journal)

'Sharp insightful and often humorous, War Dances is a truly accomplished work.'

Mitchell Jordan (Good Reading)

'Sherman Alexie is not a finicky writer. He is often messy and in-your-face in a way that can make you laugh (or shudder) when you least expect to ... War Dances is Alexie’s fiercely freewheeling collection of stories and poems about the tragicomedies of ordinary lives.'

(O, the Oprah Magazine)

'Alexie has a wry, subversive sensibility ... The structure [in War Dances] is sophisticated yet playful, a subtle way to bring lightness to heavy topics such as senility, bigotry, cancer, and loneliness ... A mix tape of a book, with many voices, pieces of different length, shifting rhythms, an evolving story.'

(Los Angeles Times)

'Sherman Alexie mixes up comedy and tragedy, shoots it through with tenderness, then delivers with a provocateur’s don’t-give-a-damn flourish. He’s unique, and his new book, War Dances, is another case in point.'

(Seattle Times)

'Few other contemporary writers seem willing to deal with issues of race, class, and sexuality as explicitly as Alexie ... [War Dances is] a virtuoso performance of wit and pathos, a cultural and familial critique and a son’s quiet, worthless scream against the night as his father expires ... [that] reminds me of the early 20th Century master of the short form Akutagawa Riyunosuke ... Yet again Sherman Alexie has given us a hell of a ride.'

(Barnes & Noble.com)

'Alexie’s works are piercing yet rueful. He writes odes to anguished pay-phone calls, to boys who would drive through blizzards to see a girl, to couples who need to sit together on airplane flights even though the computer thinks otherwise ... [A] marvelous collection.'

(Miami Herald)