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In LAST REPORT, I could sense the full lives of characters such as Nanapush, Damien's closest friend, who came with a full history by the time he was introduced in this book. Erdrich's use of the multi-narrative voice and nonlinear storyline brings specific characters in and out of focus at different times and in different books. Father Damien was a peripheral character in past books, such as Love Medicine,The Beet Queen and Tracks. Many of Erdrich's characters develop over time in her Argus novels, with intricate histories and relationships. Father Damien takes great pleasure in forgiveness, in absolving all of people's sins at confession. Through his eighty years there on the reservation (he is at least 100 years old now), he has integrated the spiritual faiths into a potent hybrid, a mystic fusion that also informs the book's imagery, without a shred of proselytizing. The central figure, Father Damien Modeste, is a Catholic missionary priest who, since coming to the Little No Horse reservation in 1912, has fluidly blended the customs of the Ojibwe people with the Holy Trinity. She interweaves a traditional pagan mysticism with Catholic catechism, the animate with the anthropomorphic. If you yoked Faulkner with Garcia-Marquez, and anointed them with the comic hijinx of John Irving, you would experience a sense of Louise Erdrich's poetic, visually imaginative power. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark. The Blue Jay's Dance, a memoir of motherhood, was her first nonfiction work, and her children's book, Grandmother's Pigeon, has been published by Hyperion Press. Henry awards and for inclusion in the annual Best American Short Story anthologies. Several of her short stories have been selected for O. Her fiction has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle (1984) and The Los Angeles Times (1985), and has been translated into fourteen languages. She also has written two collections of poetry, Jacklight, and Baptism of Desire. She is the author of four previous bestselling andaward-winning novels, including Love Medicine The Beet Queen Tracks and The Bingo Palace. Some reviewers believed they saw in The Antelope Wife the anguish Erdrich must have felt as her marriage crumbled, but she has stated that she is unconscious of having mirrored any real-life events.
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The Antelope Wife was published in 1998, not long after her separation from Michael and his subsequent suicide. She and Michael became a picture-book husband-and-wife writing team, though they wrote only one truly collaborative novel, The Crown of Columbus (1991). After she was named writer-in-residence at Dartmouth, she married professor Michael Dorris and raised several children, some of them adopted. She attended the Johns Hopkins creative writing program and received fellowships at the McDowell Colony and the Yaddo Colony. She worked at various jobs, such as hoeing sugar beets, farm work, waitressing, short order cooking, lifeguarding, and construction work, before becoming a writer. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of contemporary Native American novelists. She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Chippewa). Her father is German American and mother is half Ojibwe and half French American. Karen Louise Erdrich is a American author of novels, poetry, and children's books.