tales of coyote and other trickster beings

This one's a collection of tales of Coyote, the trickster in various stories from various Native American peoples. All of the tales are short. Some are interesting, some are pretty weak. As the introduction states, these tales were meant to be told by a storyteller, not read in a tome. I suppose I could have tried reading them aloud...
--J. ( )

A collection of anthropologists' versions, not direct transcriptions of oral tales, so a bit clunky and dusty, in spite of Lopez's stated attempts to improve the style. I suspect (I'll never know) that the tales are/were quite different in the telling. But coyote as culture-hero, clown, trickster and everyman--that is, as the closest thing to a representative of humans in the mythic world--comes through. And it struck me that there is probably even a bizarre and tortured through-line to Wile E. Coyote's hapless battles with the Roadrunner. (Weird as that may be, I'm not the only one to read classic cartoons as pop culture folk tales: cf. Steven Millhauser's great autobiographical satire Edwin Mullhouse. ( )