Imagine a world where the American government signed a conservation act to "restore all indigenous flora and fauna to the Great Plains," which means suddenly the Great Plains are Indian again. Now fast-forward fourteen years to a bowling alley deep in the Indian Territories. People that bowling alley with characters named LP Deal, Cat Stand, Mary Boy, Courtney Peltdowne, Back Iron, Denim Horse, Naitche, and give them a chance to find a treaty signed under duress by General Sherman, which effectively gives all of the Americas back to the Indians, only hide that treaty in a stolen pipe, put it in a locker, and flush the key down the toilet. Ask LP Deal and the rest what they will trade to get that key back--maybe, everything. All natural and narrative laws are suspended in the hallucinatory whirl of Jones' cuttingly funny and fantastic third novel. A Blackfoot writer with a wry yet tragic, earthy yet cosmic view of Native American life who combines bizarre murder investigations with whipsaw commentary, Jones (author most recently of All the Beautiful Sinners [BKL Ap 15 03]) imagines the consequences of a law requiring "the restoration of all indigenous flora and fauna to the Great Plains," including the establishment of an autonomous Indian Territory because Indians qualify as fauna. A bowling alley serves as a microcosm for this new New World, and its moody denizens, including manifesto-writing LP Deal; Nickel Eye, the prime suspect in a series of tourist murders; and Cat Stand, once a dairy industry poster girl, try to stay beneath the radar as undercover cops and annoying anthropologists intrude. Caustically surreal in the manner of Hunter Thompson, even William Burroughs, Jones brilliantly and audaciously critiques the ironies inherent in our frontier mythologies, racial stereotypes, and inchoate longings for justice and a meaningful life. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "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, author of Ten Little Indians "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, author of Nightland " The Bird is Gone is 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, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain Stephen Graham Jones is a Blackfoot Native American and author of numerous novels, including the award-winning FC2 novels The Fast Red Road and The Bird is Gone , and one award-winning short story collection, Bleed Into Me . He is the Ivena Baldwin professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.