What is a short story? Technically it's a story that's not more than a certain number of words or pages in length, usually a great deal shorter than even the shortest of novels. Yet there's more to a short story than just the number of words it contains. The good short story writers are able to give readers of their few pages insight into the world around them that many writers of full-length novels never manage to do. Of course our expectations when it comes to short stories are different than those we have for a full-length novel. Instead of a long, drawn out, and slowly developing plot over the course of which we gradually get to know a group of characters, we are usually plunked down into the middle of somebody's life and watch as they grapple with one particular incident.
For all we know, once we leave, after the story is done, they continue on to do other things, but that's not what caught the author's attention about them anyway. Short stories aren't much for extraneous details about a person's life, but at the same time we still somehow manage to get to know the person in the story well enough that by its end we are able to come to a conclusion about them and their life. 
How short story writers are able to do that is a bit of a mystery, one that I've never really taken the time to solve, and actually one that I'm not that interested in solving. Would you ask a stage magician to reveal the secret behind some great illusion that has left you spellbound? Well, the same goes for a short story writer as far as I'm concerned — I don't want to know how they did it, I just want to enjoy the results of their labour.
While Sherman Alexie has published three full-length novels and written a couple of screenplays, the majority of his work has either been short stories or poetry. His latest collection from the Grove/Atlantic press, War Dances is pretty much evenly split between poems and short stories, and there's not a wasted word or thought among them. When you only dole out so many words you can't afford for even one to sound faintly off, let alone discordant. In this collection Alexie is completely in tune with his subject matter, with each word and thought working together to give us 23 snapshots of life.
Alexie happens to be a member of the Spokane Nation, a Native American, so naturally quite a number of his stories and poetry deal with that reality. That doesn't mean you're going to find stories filled with eagle feathers and sweat lodges, but you will find references to things like dying a natural Indian death of alcoholism and diabetes. In the title story of the collection, "War Dances", after being diagnosed with a benign brain tumor a man recalls his father dying of the above-mentioned "natural" causes, and in the midst of his own worries about his health he goes over in his mind the things his father went through — endured — before his life finally ended.
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