This program will be held virtually on Zoom. Please register for free in advance here.
NOTE: You can also watch a live stream of the program on the Newberry Facebook page or YouTube channel.
Tune in for a special meet-the-author event with Louise Erdrich, who will be introduced by poet Mark Turcotte and joined by Native American literature scholar Kelly Wisecup for a conversation about her latest novel, The Sentence.
The Sentence asks what we owe to the living, to the dead, to the reader, and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer.
Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.
Purchase The Sentence online from the Newberry Bookshop.
This program is cosponsored by the Newberry’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies.
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