SOURCE: Jaskoski, Helen. “To Tell a Good Story.” In Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson, pp. 87-100. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Jaskoski considers the main thematic concerns of the stories in Storyteller.

Even silence was alive in his stories.

—Silko, “A Geronimo Story”

The eight short stories that form part of the mixed-genre Storyteller were all previously published, some more than once, before Storyteller appeared in 1981. They are the author's first published fiction, and several were written for university creative writing courses. Their range of form and fineness of execution are thus all the more remarkable; the stories are framed in modes as various as allegory, pastoral elegy, tragic drama, comedy of manners. Diverse as they are in form and mode, they share a common thematic concern: the nature of language...