Recommendations
Books Like Winter in the Blood
Best books to read after Winter in the Blood by James Welch
If Winter in the Blood moved you — the unnamed narrator's drift through Montana between family and town, the deadpan comedy that holds real desolation, the discovery of a grandmother's past that gives the present a shape — these eight books share its tonal complexity, its Native American literary tradition, or its portrait of a person between worlds who must build meaning from almost nothing.
- 1Buy
Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tayo, a Laguna veteran, healing through traditional ceremony — Silko's debut is the most natural companion to Winter in the Blood: both are foundational texts of the Native American literary renaissance, both follow a young Native man who has lost his connection to his community and must find his way back; where Welch's narrator's alienation is domestic (the ranch, the town, the family history), Silko's Tayo's is cosmological (the war, the witchery, the ceremony that must be renewed)
- 2Buy
House Made of Dawn
by N. Scott Momaday
Abel returning from the Second World War shattered — Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut shares Winter in the Blood's portrait of a young Native man unable to fit into either the traditional community or the contemporary American world; where Welch's comedy keeps the desolation at an ironic distance, Momaday's tragedy confronts it directly; together they represent the two dominant modes of the Native American literary renaissance
- 3Buy
The Death of Jim Loney
by James Welch
Jim Loney, a half-Indian, half-white man in a small Montana town, drifting toward self-destruction — Welch's second novel is the direct companion to Winter in the Blood: the same Montana setting, the same portrait of a man caught between Native and white worlds, the same deadpan observation of social incompetence; where the narrator of Winter in the Blood finds something at the end, Jim Loney finds his own particular form of resolution
- 4Buy
Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich
Two Ojibwe families on a North Dakota reservation across fifty years — Erdrich's debut is the Northern Plains companion to Winter in the Blood's Montana portrait: the same reservation world seen from multiple perspectives over multiple generations, the same engagement with the comedy and tragedy of contemporary Native American life, and the same insistence that Native literary fiction deserves the same formal ambition as any other tradition
- 5Buy
There There
by Tommy Orange
Twelve urban Native Americans converging on the Big Oakland Powwow — Orange's debut is the urban Native American companion to Winter in the Blood's reservation and small-town portrait: where Welch's narrator is drifting through the Montana of the 1970s, Orange's characters are urban Natives in contemporary Oakland; both novels center on characters who are between worlds and must construct a Native identity from whatever materials are available
- 6Buy
The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, catching and losing a great marlin — Hemingway's novella has been compared by critics to Winter in the Blood in its portrait of a man facing loss with a deadpan dignity that refuses sentimentality; where Hemingway's old man is at the end of his life, Welch's narrator is at the beginning of his adult self-understanding, but both works use the same tonal compression to hold sadness within a contained, ironic form
- 7Buy
Reservation Blues
by Sherman Alexie
Robert Johnson arriving on the Spokane Indian reservation with his guitar and his deal with the devil — Alexie's debut novel shares Winter in the Blood's comic approach to contemporary Native American reservation life and its engagement with the supernatural as a natural part of daily experience; where Welch's comedy is dry and ironic, Alexie's is raucous and surreal, but both writers insist on the right of Native fiction to be funny as well as serious
- 8Buy
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Junior Spirit transferring from the Spokane reservation to an all-white high school — Alexie's National Book Award winner shares Winter in the Blood's portrait of a Native person caught between worlds and the comedy that such a position generates; where Welch writes for adult readers in a mode of ironic elegy, Alexie writes for younger readers in a mode of comic autobiography, but both works are organized around the question of what it means to be Native in a world that has not made space for you
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