There There

Twelve urban Native Americans converging on the Big Oakland Powwow — a powwow robber, a social worker, a young man trying to meet his father for the first time, a woman piecing together her grandmother's history. Orange dispatches from inside a Native American experience that almost no literature has addressed: not the reservation, not the historical past, but the city, the present, the half-dozen generations of people for whom the land is gone but the identity is not. One of the most formally innovative American debut novels of the last decade.