The Power of Sentences
Louise Erdrich’s new novel is a persistent implicit commentary on the importance of words—and the communities forged by words—in the face of the traumas that haunt individual and collective lives.
Louise Erdrich
“A Wilderness of Being”: Maternity in the Apocalypse
Future Home of the Living God has been hailed as the heir to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, mostly because it talks about women forced to carry out pregnancies and dystopian political repression. Those two ideas together, however, are nothing new.
The Meeting of Spiritual Forces in Louise Erdrich’s Poetry
While Louise Erdrich’s fiction investigates the devastating impact that Catholic missionaries had on traditional Ojibwe practices, her poetry collection, Baptism of Desire, investigates a soul that exists in the hybrid space where the two spiritual forces meet.
Louise Erdrich’s Literary Children
Louise Erdrich’s most recent triptych of novels—The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016)—all feature children more prominently than adults. Children are confronted with a many-layered moral question that their experiences over the course of the novel will help them to process.
Stand With Standing Rock: Books That Honor Activism
On Sunday, the Obama administration announced that Energy Transfer Partners, the company managing construction on the pipeline, must halt until the Army Corps of Engineers completes an environmental impact study.
Authors | Interviews | Publishing | Reading | Series | Writing | Writing Advice
Writ in Water: Interview with Chris McCormick and “Desert Boys”
This month, I chat with author Chris McCormick, whose terrific debut of linked stories, Desert Boys, follows main character Daley “Kush” Kushner and his friends Robert Karinger and Dan Watts. The book is largely set in the growing desert suburbia of the Antelope Valley, 70-odd miles north of Los Angeles. We talk about what it…
Reading POC is Grand but Why Aren’t We Reading Natives?
Leonardo DiCaprio called during his Golden Globes acceptance speech for viewers to deepen our appreciation and respect for First Nations tribes, and made-for-cable movies are showing Natives in a more positive, less violent light. But what about us writers and readers? Who among us is giving a shout out to indigenous writers? As for all…
Round-Down: Is Evaluating Great Literature A Democratic or Elitist Prospect?
With many year-end best of 2014 book lists pouring out on the tail end of the National Book Award announcements last month, as well as with prize nominations opening up this month for the Pulitzers, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about literary merit prizes and how they influence the public’s opinion on what’s worth…
Crossing Over: Literary Fiction Writers Tackling YA
The other day I was browsing in a favorite bookstore, moving backward through the alphabet, when I noticed Sherman Alexie’s novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, toward the front of the As in Fiction. I stopped and looked around. Had I walked into the Young Adult/Children’s section without realizing it? No, there…