The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie 

A collection of two dozen interlinked short stories starring his usual cast of characters on the reservation. It was the basis for his movie, Smoke Signals.

Each story can stand on its own, but together they draw a canvas of stories that could only be found on the reservation. Victor Joseph, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Junior Polatkin and others live through these stories and go on to stories in other books. Sherman Alixie has a pattern of ordinariness that frequently delivers a hard punch to the gut.

"Often the stories contain people who never existed before our collective imaginations created them."