PBS Books, in collaboration with the American Indian Library Association, is pleased to celebrate Women’s History Month by hosting a program with award-winning writer Louise Erdrich, author of “The Sentence,” in conversation with Allison Waukau, vice president of the American Indian Library Association. Join us for a thought-provoking conversation and learn about Erdrich, her new book and her creative process.
ABOUT THE BOOK: “The Sentence”
Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, “The Sentence,” asks what we owe to the living, 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 Erdrich has written.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Louise Erdrich
LOUISE ERDRICH, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel “The Round House” won the National Book Award for Fiction. “Love Medicine”, and “LaRose” received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Her book, “The Night Watchman,” won the Pulitzer Prize. A ghost lives in her creaky old house.