There There Study Guide

There There is Tommie Orange’s debut novel, published in 2018 and hailed as a stunning contribution to a new generation of contemporary indigenous writing in North America. This new wave of writers is marked by their experiments with form and a diverse range of contemporary influences. They are reshaping Native American literature and challenging the stereotypes of Native life confined to history or the reservation. Among Orange’s contemporaries are Terese Mailhot of the Seabird Island First Nation, whose poetic memoir Heart Berries (2018) is a New York Times bestseller, and Billy-Ray Belcourt, a Driftpile Cree poet whose 2017 book This Wound Is a World made him the youngest-ever recipient of the Canadian Griffin Prize. There There was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and is the most-honored literary debut of 2018, winning a best new book prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Award for distinguished new novel.