The Beadworkers
A Chicago Review of Books Pick of the Month
A Nylon Magazine Pick of New Books to Read This Month
A Literary Hub Pick of the Week
A Salon Magazine Pick of Best Books of the Month
Longlisted for the 2020 Aspen Words Literary Prize
Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
Finalist for the Reading the West Book Award
A BookPage Top Pick of Can't-Miss Reads
Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
Beth Piatote’s luminous debut collection opens with a feast, grounding its stories in the landscapes and lifeworlds of the Native Northwest, exploring the inventive and unforgettable pattern of Native American life in the contemporary world
Told with humor, subtlety, and spareness, the mixed-genre works of Beth Piatote’s first collection find unifying themes in the strength of kinship, the pulse of longing, and the language of return.
A woman teaches her niece to make a pair of beaded earrings while ruminating on a fractured relationship. An eleven-year-old girl narrates the unfolding of the Fish Wars in the 1960s as her family is propelled to its front lines. In 1890, as tensions escalate at Wounded Knee, two young men at college—one French and the other Lakota—each contemplate a death in the family. In the final, haunting piece, a Nez Perce–Cayuse family is torn apart as they debate the fate of ancestral remains in a moving revision of the Greek tragedy Antigone.
Formally inventive and filled with vibrant characters, The Beadworkers draws on Indigenous aesthetics and forms to offer a powerful, sustaining vision of Native life.
Praise