Leanne Howe

To purists, fiction is fiction and nonfiction is nonfiction and never the twain shall meet. Attempts to combine the two genres often result in stories that have neither the magic of imagination nor the familiar oddity of a true story. In Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, LeAnne Howe combines truth and fiction in a tale that is built on historical facts and documents but stands firmly in the world of make-believe. After finding an old pouch full of newspaper clippings and a diary, the half-Choctaw, half-Sac and Fox Lena Bolin begins to track down the story of the 1907 Twin Territories' Pennant between the all-Indian Kings and the Seventh Cavalryman. Among the characters Lena meets is Ezol Day, a time-traveling post office worker whose storytelling wanders as easily through Choctaw tradition as it does physics, linguistics, and anthropology. The result is a novel that is beautiful, at times funny, and totally, satisfyingly original.
Tue., Oct. 30, 7 p.m., 2007