We can't let the Halloween season go without featuring one horror book, and Sarah Gerton of Excelsior Bay Books in Excelsior said her pick is “Between Two Fires” by Christopher Buehlman.

The setting is medieval France: The black plague era. A disgraced ex-knight named Thomas encounters a girl who tells him of her visions of a war between heaven and hell that will be raged over control of Earth. Are her words the ravings of a person gone mad, or is she expressing saintly visions? Thomas himself has lost his faith, but he finds himself accompanying the girl and a priest across France to help her with her quest.

"I would definitely recommend [this novel] for adults with a strong stomach," cautions Gerton. "This a very, very dark book, so all the trigger warnings [apply]."

And yet, this book has garnered a following. It was originally self-published in 2012, and over the years it gained such a devoted social media following that earlier this year, Tor — part of major publisher Macmillan — released a hard cover edition with black sprayed edges.

Gerton said she was struck by the tone, which to her felt epic and “almost biblical,” like the translation of an ancient tale. She'd love to see this story make its way to film.

“Some of the monsters that they encounter are, like, crazy, and like I would love to see this adapted. But at the same time, I don’t know how they could translate some of the battle scenes,” says Gerton.

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Amber Blaeser-Wardzala is Anishinaabe from White Earth Reservation — spending most of her early years on the reservation — and she comes from a long line of storytellers.

“I grew up being surrounded by

Anishinaabe stories, oral stories were some of my favorites as a kid, and they really impacted the way that I tell stories and the way I think about stories,” Blaeser-Wardzala told MPR News.

The narrator in her new book “Another Name for Red” is “Middle Sister.” She's not in a good place after her oldest sister disappears from the community. And in the wake of that tragedy, the whole family has fallen apart. Middle Sister is barely holding on and is consumed with guilt over her last words to her sister, not to mention her rage at the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the country.

With a father who has checked out in front of the television, a mother who spends her time at marches and protests, and two younger siblings who need support and protection, Middle Sister is determined to find out what, exactly, happened to Oldest Sister. And, while she ultimately does find an answer, it comes with a steep cost.

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There are almost no real names mentioned in the book; Blaeser-Wardzala says that was a deliberate choice on her part to try and connect the story back to the traditions of the Anishinaabe language and culture.

“Another Name for Red” is Amber Blaeser-Wardzala's debut novel. You'll find more of the author's work in a much-lauded compilation from 2023, “Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology.” Blaeser-Wardzala will be at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis on Wednesday and at Content Bookstore in Northfield on Thursday.

Min Jin Lee was disappointed she didn’t get to come to Talking Volumes in 2017 to talk about her novel “Pachinko.” She says that’s probably because it struggled initially. Her editor quit just three months before the book was published. Her husband lost his job the day “Pachinko” was released. And besides The New York Times and USA Today, no media companies would review her book.

But that slow burn eventually ignited into a blazing inferno. The New York Times named it one of the 10 best books of 2017 and, by 2022, it had been made into a TV series by Apple — which propelled another waves of global sales.

So it was with great pleasure that Lee came to Talking Volumes this year, to talk about her new novel, “American Hagwon.”

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During her time on stage at The O'Shaughnessy with host Kerri Miller, Lee talked about her years of researching hagwons — a type of cram school, common in Korea — and how they change education. In particular, she sees an intense global competitiveness in Korean students, which stands in sharp contrast to students in American falling further and further behind.

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But Lee and Miller also talked about Lee’s path to becoming a well-known author and how Lee’s own childhood of being an exceptional student who struggled socially influences her work. For one thing: she’s learned to hold her own and fight back, if necessary.

“Asian American women are not considered strong,” she told Miller, “but they're wrong. I mean, if you really just like look at the data, it's like: are you kidding me? Do you know any Asian American women? But I think we're perceived to be weak, and they clearly don't know any history. This doesn’t happen in Asia. But here in the U.S., I've had I've had some people do some very stupid things, and I will do what I need to do.”

It was a dazzling evening, highlighted by musical guest Sophie Hiroko.

There are only two more Talking Volumes shows of the 2026 season: Emily St. John Mandel on Nov. 4, and Colson Whitehead with special guest host Catharine Richert on Nov. 11. Get your tickets online.

Artist Sam Zimmerman, who is a descendant of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, returned to Minnesota's North Shore in 2019 after working out of state for years.

"There's nothing that compares to the North Shore. The beauty of it, the ever-changing landscape. Its spirit and personality is so amazing. Even the air changes from Duluth to Cook County,” Zimmerman said.

After returning to Minnesota, Zimmerman released a series of paintings from his first year back home. His newest collection features more than 80 artworks organized by season, accompanied by stories in English and Ojibwe. It’s called “Walking My Ancestors’ Path.”

"My ancestors have walked this shore for hundreds of years, and so this is me following in their footsteps of being back home in northern Minnesota,” he said.

Zimmerman paints landscapes and animals in bright acrylic colors. He blends styles, including Woodland art, which uses strong outlines, vivid colors and x-ray views of subjects.

"As an Indigenous creator, I use a lot of dots, which isn't unique, but in some ways, they're very abstract,” said Zimmerman.

One painting honors his grandfather. It shows a buck with intricate patterns covering its body.

"It's titled ‘Runs Through the Woods Like Deer’ because that was his Ojibwe name. He was incredibly fast in the woods, and it is a buck running through a winter scene with four pine trees in the background, and those four pine trees represent the number of children that he had. He had four sons. My dad was the youngest,” he said.

The scene also shows a fire tower under a sunset sky filled with oranges and reds. Stars represent the years his grandfather and uncles lived.

Zimmerman said he created the piece to honor the man who taught him the importance of storytelling.

"It allows for traditions and culture and lessons learned to be passed down from elders and others. And so I'm a storyteller using art, and stories are important. They share our history, they share our values,” Zimmerman said.

Those connections to family and community guide his life.

“Having the elders and the community that I have around me, both family and blood and also relationships, has allowed me to walk a path that has helped me grow and learn,” he said.

Zimmerman’s experiences of growth and learning are shared in "Walking My Ancestors' Path."

A book launch event will be held Thursday, Oct. 22 from 6-8 p.m. at Mill City Museum in Minneapolis. The event is free and open to the public.

An accompanying exhibit with paintings featured in Zimmerman’s book will be on display through March 28, 2027, during regular public museum hours.

Chandra Colvin covers Native American communities in Minnesota for MPR News via Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.  

Author Jack el-Hai is a master at identifying lost historical moments and turning them into fascinating nonfiction books.

The Minneapolis-based author did it with "The Psychiatrist and the Nazi," which was adapted into the film "Nuremberg,” which starred Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring and Rami Malek as the psychiatrist sent to evaluate whether high-ranking Nazi war criminals were mentally competent to stand trial.

Now, el-Hai is back with another true story centered around a high-profile relationship. "The Case of the Autographed Corpse" follows an Apache spiritual leader who was convicted in 1933 of killing his wife. Silas John Edwards insisted from the beginning he was wrongfully convicted. But it wasn't until he reached out to mystery writer Earl Stanley Gardner that his case got attention.

Gardner is best known as the creator of Perry Mason, the fictional detective at the center of scores of books and a hit TV series. He was also deeply committed to investigating possible cases of wrongful convictions. In the 1940s, he started an organization called the Court of Last Resort, similar to today's Innocence Project.

When Gardner got a letter from Edwards pleading for help, he was struck by the confidence of the Apache man and agreed to take the case.

Known for his meticulous research, el-Hai was able to trace Gardner’s path as he traversed Arizona to find witnesses and clues. In the end, he was able to get Edwards freed. But his work also revealed the racial tensions inherent in Edwards’ wrongful conviction.

"Silas John was proud of the Apaches' history and spiritual past, and he wanted them to be able to determine their own lives and fates while living on these Apache reservations of Arizona, and it was very difficult for them to do so,“ said el-Hai. “Gardner, in the same vein, was exceptionally proud of the American system of justice and, as a result, determined to identify its flaws and fix them. So [pride is] really the common denominator between these men. And I think pride is something we all feel, and that I hope will will resonate with readers today."

To mark the launch of "The Case of the Autographed Corpse," Magers and Quinn Booksellers is hosting a conversation Thursday night, Oct. 15, between el-Hai and James Mayer, the legal director of the Great North Innocence Project. The event is free, but registration is recommended.

A library in Minneapolis is celebrating 40 years of collecting and lending LGBTQ+ books, movies and other materials.

Quatrefoil Library started in 1986 as a personal collection shared among friends. Today, it has more than 25,000 items and more than 11,000 library card holders. And the library says that number doubled just in 2026.

Iggy Gehlen is the board vice president and programming chair at Quatrefoil. He talked with MPR News host Nina Moini about the importance of the library and its recent enormous growth in members.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

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We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

Amy Erickson of Bluebird Books in Detroit Lakes loved the novel “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt” by Ben Reeves, but it’s a difficult one to describe. The book is about a man named Travis, who lives in a normal apartment with a cat and has a job he takes seriously: he is literally Death.

“Please don't let that put you off, because it is actually really fascinating,” says Erickson.

Giving Death a name is not a punchline, nor is it morbid. Travis visits people in their final moments, offers comfort, and delivers them to where they go next (which is not specified in the book). Because Travis is constantly aware of everyone, everywhere, the novel is filled with vignettes and snippets of the lives of ordinary people in a way that reminded Erickson of Allen Levi’s blockbuster novel, “Theo of Golden.”

Travis does not intervene with a person’s fate. He avoids making friends with the living until he is drawn into the lives of the woman and her two daughters living across the hall, who invite him to take part in the precious moments of everyday life.

“It is so well written. I just fell in love with this book,” says Erickson.

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To mark the fall member drive, Kerri Miller dips back into three conversations she’s had this year with authors who write about nature — and thus, wrestle with what they see climate change doing to our planet. How do we live richly in the midst of a great unraveling?

We start by revisiting the Big Books and Bold Ideas with Terry Tempest Williams, a writer and teacher at the Harvard School of Divinity. Her latest book is "The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary," which itself is a meditation on attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds.

Naturalist Robert Macfarlane's new book "The Book of Birds” — done in collaboration with artist Jackie Morris — is an ode to our avian friends. Macfarlane insists he's not a birder; he's just an appreciator. But he's thoughtful and poetic about what he observes. He says he wrote "The Book of Birds" to reignite a sense of wonder about about birds because "we will not save what we do not love."

Author Cal Flynn lives on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, so maybe it's no surprise that she's obsessed with wilderness. Research for her new book, "The Savage Landscape," led her to climb mountains, plunge into forests and helicopter to volcanoes. But more than adventure, Flynn was in search of what these wild places mean for humanity.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

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A new LGBTQ+ magazine and website has launched in Minnesota, three months after Lavender Magazine shut down its operations after a 30-year run. Lavender was a mainstay for the LGBTQ+ community in the state.

Q Minnesota was created by several former Lavender staffers. The very first issue came out last Thursday.

For more about the launch and what’s ahead, MPR News host Nina Moini spoke with Q Minnesota editor-in-chief and publisher, Andy Lien, and vice president of digital content and marketing, Nell Gelhaus.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

When Kristin Kobes Du Mez’ book “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation” was published in 2020, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon for the way it connected evangelical hypermasculinity with support for President Donald Trump.

Now, Du Mez is back with a follow-up — but this time, she’s focused on Christian women.

“I wanted to look at the popular religious culture that shapes Christian women's lives: Christian radio, Christian publishing, romance novels, mommy blogs, influencers, multi-level marketing companies, Mary Kay, Lularoe, all of these fun things. Hobby Lobby, right? Joanna Gaines. So I thought it was going to be a fun book,” she said.

“In the end, it was not. In the end, what I ended up uncovering was just how economic and cultural and political values are embedded inside these seemingly fluffy products that actually also help us understand how we got to our political moment today."

In “Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made,” Du Mez traces the roots of modern Christian femininity to 19th century holiness theology — a type of Christianity that promises happiness if you totally surrender to God. And that's reflected by a subculture that subtly reinforces the ideals of prosperity and purity.

By revealing this often hidden world, Du Mez hopes to make some sense out of our current moment.

She will be in Minneapolis Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church for a conversation with Rev. Angela Denker about the book hosted by Magers & Quinn Booksellers. Tickets are free but RSVPs are required.

In northern Minnesota, the largest stretch of peatlands in the contiguous U.S. can be found. This wet terrain has taken thousands of years to form. And draws scientists and experts from around the world.

That includes Jennifer de Mooy, who spent quite a bit of time there researching for her new book: "Water, Carbon, Time: Exploring Peatlands in a Warming World."

Minnesota Now host Nina Moini spoke to de Mooy about these important ecosystems.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

The way we build careers and make money is changing. MPR News host Angela Davis talks with journalist Lee Hawkins about how people create businesses, move forward after career setbacks and make financial decisions — and what we can learn from their journeys to success.

Guest:

• Lee Hawkins is a contributor to American Public Media — a unit of American Public Media Group, the parent company of MPR News — and a Spencer Education Fellow at Columbia University. He is a Minnesota native and a journalist who spent 19 years at The Wall Street Journal. He is the host of “Must Be the Money,” a podcast produced by Marketplace, and author of the book, "I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free.” He is also host of the podcasts, “What Happened in Alabama” and “Unlocking the Gates: How the North Led Housing Discrimination in America,” produced by APM Studios.

• Chris Farrell is a senior economics contributor for MPR News and Marketplace.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

One January night, in the future, four out-of-season tornadoes converge on Minneapolis and flatten whole blocks in minutes. That's the opening of Kawai Strong Washburn's propulsive new novel “The Names of the New World.” That storm throws together three strangers whose lives will become entangled over the next 25 years.

Washburn, who grew up in Hawaii and now lives in Minneapolis, has seen the predictive models that show the places he loves in Hawaii stand a good chance of being destroyed as the planet warms.

As the opening chapter of his new book shows, no place is climate-proof. But if the thought of supercharged storms, bleached coral reefs, and flooding Pacific islands makes you want to crawl under the bed, don't let that fear keep you from this book.

The writing is electric, the characters quickly make you feel invested, and, despite the backdrop, Washburn has zero interest in imagining a dystopia.

In his vision of the future, the human tendency toward compassion and mutual aid drive characters’ decisions, even as Mother Nature serves up harrowing challenges.

“More than anything, I'm hoping this book being out in the world gives people a vision of the future that feels worth fighting for,” Washburn said. “A vision of the future that makes people want to ask, ‘Why not? Why can we not do that? What's stopping us from doing that?’ And in their own ways, answers that move them closer to being part of the solution.”

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Washburn got national attention for his first novel, "Sharks in the Time of Saviors." The family saga hit "Best Book of 2020" lists for a dozen major publications, and its awards include the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and a Minnesota Book Award. Former president Barack Obama named it one of his favorite books of the year.

The book comes out Oct. 6 and Washburn will read from "Names of the New World" at an event hosted by Milkweed Books and Rain Taxi at Open Book in Minneapolis with local poet Claire Wahmanholm.

Americans in recent years have become accustomed to seeing people without homes setting up tents on sidewalks or in parks. Panhandlers at intersections. Cars with windows blocked by cardboard as the occupants sleep.

The five families Goldstone follows through modern Atlanta are less visible, but they’re right there, making your latte and trying to keep their balance on the slippery edge of homelessness. It doesn’t take much, usually a misunderstanding with a shift manager or a broken rule at an apartment, to make them lose their footing.

Readers of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s “Random Family” and Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” nonfiction narratives will recognize Brian Goldstone’s approach. He embeds with families over a period of years to tell a broader story about how our country’s leaders and the policies they’ve enacted have failed our citizens.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” sensitively brings readers into the precarious existence faced by so many Americans, from sketchy emergency shelters to the pricey, run-down extended stay hotels that have bloomed on the outskirts of American cities.

The book isn’t all gloom. There are moments of beauty and joy. But anxiety infuses the stories in this book, and stress permeates every character. The subjects’ dreams are modest. They want safe housing, a decent job and a future where they can enjoy more of life’s small pleasures. It’s heartbreaking to watch even these little dreams fall away.

All the stories in this book, from low-wage airport workers struggling to make rent to single mothers forced to camp in their car, are tests of whether America is keeping its basic promise: work hard and you’ll be rewarded.

Our country has minted the first trillionaire in human history, but a growing number of working Americans can’t afford a home. Wealth inequality is increasing. Social services are disappearing. That’s a choice, Goldstone says, and a failure: “Such suffering is so unnecessary, so utterly preventable. We have the solutions. We have the resources. What we need now is the will to act.”

Read MPR News senior reporter Jon Collins full interview transcript below.

Collins: Paint a picture for me of how you settled on this specific topic, or even how you met the folks that are featured in your book.

Goldstone: My wife Elaine, who is a nurse practitioner, was working at a community health center in Atlanta, and we share a car. So every day, I would pick her up from work, and we would debrief our days. And she started to tell me about this trend she was seeing among her patients. Her patients were working, often not just one job, but multiple jobs at places like Walmart, or they were driving for Uber or Lyft, or they were packing boxes in Amazon warehouses.

What she was learning from them was that when they finished their shifts, they weren’t going to a home; they were homeless. And when she told me about that, I was stunned. Even as an educated person and someone who had even reported and researched on economic injustice and equality around the globe, I had never made the connection between work and homelessness, much less unpacked and investigated.

That really spurred me to first write a magazine story for the New Republic, following one family in Atlanta, and when that was done, I realized that I had only scratched the surface.

That there was so much more to know, and crucially that there were so many systems, not just housing, not just low wages and the volatility of work itself, but so many other systems, childcare, healthcare — that were kind of colliding to make this crisis not only possible, but I would argue, inevitable and predictable.

Collins: The conventional wisdom for Americans would be, “Well, you have a job, then you can afford a house.” But your book really illustrates the divide that many people, especially low-wage workers, are experiencing as they try to juggle everything in their lives and make it work.

Goldstone: Absolutely, for a lot of people, including me, the term “working homeless,” which is kind of at the center of this book, that term is not just contradictory; it's kind of scandalous. Many of us have been taught to believe in America that if you just work hard enough, if you just clock enough hours, you might not be able to buy a mansion, but you will at least have your most basic material needs met.

And yet for the five families who I followed for nearly six years for this book, and the many, many, many people like them, they are working and working and working some more, and it still isn't enough.

And it explodes our ideas about meritocracy — it explodes the American dream. If in the richest nation on the planet, a full-time job or multiple jobs still can't get you a roof overhead, then what is going on? And so that was really the question that was kind of hanging over my reporting throughout this period.

Collins: One of the things that really struck me from your book is the level of stress that people experience. It's not even just people stressed about their job or making a living. It's people trying to envision themselves in a stable place. It permeates every story in your book. What sort of change did you see in them during these six years?

Goldstone: There's a term that public health experts use to refer to exactly what you're describing, and that term is toxic stress. It's so important to just linger on that phrase, toxic stress.

Because that is stress that is so chronic and so debilitating that it can actually alter your brain chemistry. It can fundamentally alter your long-term trajectory. And this was especially harrowing when it came to the children in this book, to see how this toxic stress that they were plunged into and forced to endure was really choking off their futures, choking off their opportunity, choking off the rest of their lives before they had even started.

It's the stress, the ways that it then cascades into other things. The way that sleeplessness can cascade into a car accident, as happened with one person in the book, Kara, and then that leads to yet other tragic things in her life.

The important point that I really want readers to constantly be aware of is that these conditions, these circumstances are not God-given; they are not somehow natural. This isn't a Greek tragedy where these families are just struck with this unforeseen malady. Each of the circumstances documented in the book are utterly preventable.

Yes, people make choices that they regret later on. Yes, these are human beings. These are not superhuman angels or something who can do no wrong. And yet there are whole systems, whole structures just militating constantly against their stability at every turn, and that is precisely what produces that kind of deep, deep anxiety and stress on a daily basis.

Collins: Cars were also, in my mind, a character in your book to a certain degree, they serve as shelter sometimes, right? But they also are necessary in many American cities, especially Atlanta, to be able to get around, to get to work. And when something like a car falls through, everything else cascades behind.

Goldstone: Atlanta, like many cities in the country, is a place where you really have to have a car to get by. For Kara, one of the moms in the book, her car was the way that she was able to earn her income.

Because when the pandemic hit and she lost her job as a home health aide and the kids were out of school and she didn't have any childcare, she put her four kids in the car with her and started driving for DoorDash, delivering food. And so her car was literally the vehicle for her income.

There was one moment in the book where they're at a birthday party. She's taken the kids to the park to celebrate her son's birthday, and her son spills juice on her phone accidentally, and Kara just bursts into a tirade against her son.

Anyone walking by would think, “OK, this is an abusive situation. What's going on here?” But what they wouldn't know was that if this phone died, if this phone was damaged, she wouldn't be able to use her app to drive for DoorDash.

That same car becomes the closest thing that they have to shelter when Kara and the kids are forced to sleep in her car in a Walmart parking lot, terrified that a cop will knock on the window and call Child Protective Services and take the kids away.

Cars are central, and when people ultimately lose their car because they can't make the car payment anymore, and it gets repossessed, that's just one more kind of part of the safety net that has been shredded for these families.

Collins: You really can't talk about income inequality or poverty in the United States without also talking about race. First off, what sort of impacts do you see on folks in that regard? And how did you approach it as a white journalist?

Goldstone: There's a cliche in this country that anyone can become homeless, anyone can experience poverty, that it's colorblind, and to some extent, that's true. There are people from all kinds of backgrounds and of all races who experience this kind of homelessness.

And yet, in Atlanta, where the book is based, even though Atlanta is no longer a majority Black city, an astonishing 93 percent of families who are homeless are Black. That racialized dimension is really replicated in every city around the country.

Here in the Twin Cities, we know that Black and Indigenous families and individuals are overwhelmingly represented in the homeless population. So homelessness is not as colorblind as we would like to believe, and that has a history. There's an entire history of displacement, segregation, dispossession and displacement behind these disparities.

Going into this project, I really wanted to have this kind of demographic plurality. I wanted to have people from many backgrounds — the white working-class family. But the truth was, as I started going to food pantries on Saturday morning and going to shelters, everyone there was Black.

And so I had to confront the question of “What will it mean as a white man to do work where it is going to be primarily about not just black families and individuals, but lots of single mothers as well?”

I just tried to be as acutely conscious at every point in this process of the biases that I was bringing to this, the ignorance that I was bringing. And I hope that some of that ignorance, some of that naivete, was actually productive because it allowed me to have a kind of curiosity about what these families were experiencing.

But that's a question, among many other questions, that really kept me up at night, and that I think anyone doing this work needs to really struggle with.

Collins: Gender was also a huge theme. You saw it repeated over and over in these families that much of the burden falls on the women in the family. Not all of it, of course, but the women in the family and the girls in the family carry a lot of the burdens. How did you think about that, and how did you sort of navigate that fact?

Goldstone: It's absolutely true that in the population of working homeless families, and really just homeless families, they are disproportionately headed by single mothers.

I didn't go out looking for this, but when I met a family where it was a two-parent household, in the book, their names are Maurice and Natalia, it also felt very crucial to show that even in a two-parent household, even with a father who is absolutely devoted to his children and to his spouse, they too can [be] pushed into homelessness by by these larger structures.

I just learned yesterday the devastating news that Maurice died tragically in a work accident. It feels very raw for me because Maurice was so determined that through allowing me to tell his family stories, that this crisis would finally be addressed, and that people would no longer feel the shame of experiencing the kind of insecurity that his own family and so many others do experience in this country.

Gender was in the mix throughout. There are a lot of really bad men in this book. I think that's the only way to put it. There are a lot of men who are not there for their children or their partners, and I just try to show the reality of what was happening, in all of its messiness and authenticity.

Collins: How do you deal with that sort of frustration that there's not a clean ending?

Goldstone: There were so many times as I was writing the book, and even during the reporting, where I wished I was writing a novel, where I could just kind of take the material I had documented, but put a happy ending on it, to give a tidy resolution. There really isn't one.

And Maurice and Natalia, I think, were the closest ones in the book to finding themselves at the end of the book in a place of of peace, and kind of making it through this absolutely tumultuous and wrenching year that they went through when they were homeless with their children living in an extended stay hotel.

I just have to allow that to be. I have to allow the fact that this isn't a novel; that this is real life. And you know, one thing that I believe now is that it's on us. It's on readers. It's on those who encountered these stories. It's on us as citizens to ensure that their ending, which is still being written, their lives, are ongoing, that their ending can find security.

I just always go back to the sheer scale and magnitude of this problem. There are so many languishing in a manufactured invisibility. The fact that as I argue, the real number of people who are unhoused in this country is conservatively about six times greater than the official number.

So close to 4 million men, women and children without homes in this country. The ending for all of those millions of men, women and children remains to be written. That is my hope: that readers will not just finish the book feeling sad, but that they will feel empowered to demand that the suffering end.

Thankfully for the hotel guests — and mystery readers — Miss Marple is there, observing from the sidelines and taking it all in.

As Foley told Kerri Miller at Talking Volumes, “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel” is the first full-length, commissioned novel featuring Agatha Christie’s beloved Miss Marple in fifty years. The challenge was translating her into a more modern sensibility.

Talking Volumes: Lucy Foley

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“[Miss Marple] would definitely not describe herself as a feminist icon,” Foley told Miller on stage at The O'Shaughnessy. “I think she would say, ‘I’m just a traditional Victorian who believes in traditional Victorian values.’ But in terms of her creation, she absolutely is, because she’s an old lady who uses her invisibility as an older woman as her superpower.”

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Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel

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Agatha Christie fans since childhood, Foley and Miller also talk about the magic of Christie’s mysteries and her belief in the importance of “fair play” with the reader. Is it really possible all the clues are hidden in plain sight? Foley says absolutely. Because what’s the fun of a mystery novel if you can’t figure out who done it?

The appropriately mysterious and magical Minneapolis-based musician Aby Wolf provided music for the evening.

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Nearly a century ago, thousands of Minneapolis workers went on strike in the middle of the Great Depression. It turned violent and police shot dozens of strikers, killing two.

Members of a Teamsters local were fighting for union recognition, better wages and limits on their working hours. The strike ultimately helped turn Minneapolis into what was known as a union town.

Now, author John Hanson has written a new book about the strike, called “Fight & Win: Minneapolis Teamsters Strike, 1934." He joined MPR News host Nina Moini to talk about his personal connection to the story.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

Carol Anderson has been sounding the alarm for years.

As a historian at Emory University, she is intimately acquainted with America’s legacy when it comes to voting access. Her book, “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy,” was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2018.

She brought her deep knowledge of history and concern about what’s happening to voting access now to Red Wing on Sept. 23.

During a conversation at the Sheldon Theatre with MPR News host Kerri Miller, Anderson said she’s worried the Jim Crow-era is beginning anew, thanks to persistent attempts to deny communities of color their right to vote.

“I see it as the result of a long-term campaign to undermine the strength of our electoral systems,” she told Miller. “How many times can you hear ‘stolen election, stolen election, voter fraud, voter fraud, voter fraud?’ If you say a lie enough times, it becomes the truth, and there's a nasty long history of hollering ‘voter fraud.’”

But while Anderson acknowledged the country’s track record on voting access is grim, she also applauded the only thing that has ever held it at bay: voters who are active and civically engaged. She pointed to the Red Wing audience as evidence.

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One Person, No Vote

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“This is, what, a Wednesday evening? And you’re here listening to a talk about voter suppression and voting rights?” she laughed. “This is where our strength is. It is people getting educated about what’s happening and knowing not to listen to the lies about election integrity and voter fraud.”

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Foggy mornings, apples and pumpkins abound: anyone in the mood for a ghost story? Or rather, in the case of Shannon Sanders’ debut novel, “The Great Wherever,” a story narrated by ghosts who have some pretty strong opinions about the living? This recommendation comes from Victoria Ford of Comma, a bookshop in Minneapolis.

Here’s the scenario: Aubrey is 31, adrift and in debt, when she learns that she and three cousins have inherited the family homestead in Tennessee. Aubrey’s great-grandfather was one of the first Black landowners in the country, and legacy draws the cousins together to make a fraught decision: keep the land or sell it?

Watching over the four living characters are four ghosts whose deaths prevented them from inheriting. Tethered to the land, they do not want to see it turned into a Costco parking lot. As the ghosts observe, gossip about, and try to influence the cousins, the stories of their own lives and deaths — the secrets that are also part of the family inheritance — come to light.

“I just loved Shannon Sanders' voice as an author. She's funny and wry, even though it's a bit of a sad story,” Ford said. “It's a hot summer in Tennessee, and [you can practically] smell the barbecue and feel the sweat trickling down your back as the cousins are debating what to do.”

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Louise Erdrich's latest honor inspired in her a new appreciation of how the supposedly solitary art of writing depends on the help of others.

Erdrich is this year's recipient of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. It's named for the late sisters — silent film actors Dorothy and Lillian Gish — whose will called for the establishment of an award for "an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”

Since the prize began, in 1994, winners have included Bob Dylan,Frank Gehry, Merce Cunningham and Ava DuVernay.

Erdrich, 72, is already a Pulitzer winner for her 2020 novel “The Night Watchman” and a National Book Award winner for her 2012 novel “The Round House.” In 2015, she received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. During a recent telephone interview with The Associated Press, Erdrich said that after learning of the Gish award, she researched the lives of the two actors and was impressed by how they made everyone involved in a given film feel appreciated.

“They would talk to the stage hands and anyone else who was around, the people who helped put a production together. That's something very close to my heart,” said Erdrich, citing her experience as a bookstore owner. “I love being part of the entire structure of bringing books to people.”

Like such peers as Ann Patchett and Lauren Groff, Erdrich has firsthand knowledge in both the creation and selling of books. In 2001, she helped found Birchbark Books, an independent store based in Minneapolis that champions “the power of good writing, the beauty of handmade art, the strength of Native culture, and the importance of small and intimate bookstores.” (Erdrich, whose books often center on Native lives, is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.)

In a statement released Friday, Gish selection committee member Sara Reisman praised Erdrich's writing for its “indelible effect on my understanding of Indigenous life.”

“Adjacent to her writing practice is Birchbark Books," Reisman added, “a community-based teaching bookstore with international presence that amplifies the work of Native and non-Native writers (and) celebrates that which makes each of us different.”

Have Americans given up a sense of virtue in their political leaders? What does character mean when so-called “authenticity” is prized over moral goodness?

As publisher of The Bulwark and host of The Focus Group podcast, Sarah Longwell has thought long and hard about these questions. When she was a young conservative growing up in the ‘90s, she applauded Republicans who held then-President Bill Clinton to task for his moral failings.

“I was very attracted to the idea that character counted,” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “In the years post-Clinton, that idea of virtue or character really was animating for the right — at least in their rhetoric. So it was deeply shocking to me, when Donald Trump came on the scene, to see every Republican I knew, both personally and who I had admired from afar, fall in line.”

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How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time

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Longwell’s new book, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time,” is a call for pro-democracy groups to unite and push back against authoritarianism. Her thesis is built upon hundreds of focus groups she’s conducted since President Trump was elected — with Republicans, Democrats, Independents and the politically homeless — where she’s heard voters say that character just isn’t the deal breaker that it used to be.

“But I do think for America to have a better moral line of what we’ll tolerate,” she says. “It will require a [candidate] to come in and — not pretend to be perfect — but they should lean hard into the idea that we can be better than this.”

Guest:

• Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark and host of The Focus Group podcast. Her new book, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time,” is already a New York Times bestseller.

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Say you've written a book. Congratulations! Now begins the long process of trying to get it published. While you are sending out your work and waiting — and waiting — for that elusive “yes,” what do you do?

For Carolyn Williams-Noren, the frustrating process inspired her to start sharing her work without waiting for permission.

Williams-Noren began by following the path most poets take to finding a traditional publisher. She sent her manuscript to poetry contests and to open reading periods for various publishers, waiting months to hear back from each.

“I started to really crave just being able to share work more immediately. I started to actually take inspiration from cooking dinner, like during this period of extreme discouragement with being able to ever share or publish poetry publicly, I realized that I had actually been sort of cooking dinner for my family almost every night for a couple of decades, and that there was sort of no internal drama about that.”

She started making comics: illustrated favorite recipes, sprinkled with comments and anecdotes. She emailed them to friends, and the feedback was great. The email list grew, and so did the stack of comics. She took a workshop on riso printing and started to think about printing her own zine.

Then, about a year ago, Williams-Noren got the call. Her poetry collection had won the Wick Poetry Center's nationwide first book contest, judged by preeminent poet and podcaster Pádraig Ó Tuama. Kent State University Press wanted to publish her collection. She was thrilled.

The book is called “Oil Courses,” and it came out earlier this month. Here’s how she describes the work:

“It is inspired by my experience growing up in Alaska with a dad who worked in the oil industry, and it kind of comes out of my lifelong, really deep understanding of how reliant we are on oil, and also of the harm that extracting and using fossil fuels can do.”

She also kept pursuing that zine, which she titled “This is Good.” Picture a staple-bound mini book with a homey, handmade look, printed in blue ink. It’s the first in a series.

“I bought the paper, so I'm in,” she said, laughing. “I have enough comics made to make four issues, and I'm planning to do four over the next year and do them quarterly."

It's a tale of two Creations: poetry collection on a weighty topic from a university press and a self-published zine that includes her favorite recipe for chicken noodle soup. But Williams-Noren says she's so proud of both.

“The publication of the poetry book is an honor. The making of the zine is fun and exciting, and I’m really not willing to say that one is more valuable or more important than the other. They both have their place in my creative practice right now.”

And she hopes her work inspires readers to create.

Williams-Noren is holding launch event for both books on Sept. 24 at 6:30 p.m. at The Toolbox Collective in Minneapolis.

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Did you ever read the “Baby-Sitter's Club” books? Who was your favorite character?

That series by Ann M. Martin is now 40 years old, and it keeps on ticking, having spun off into graphic novels, a Netflix series and even a musical in development, with music by the composer of “KPop Demon Hunters.”

To mark the milestone anniversary, Scholastic is releasing 15 expanded "Super Special" books, which are longer and feature the voices of the whole club.

The first, released Sept. 15, is "Baby-Sitters on Board," a graphic novel adapted and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier and Gale Galligan. Today’s young “Baby-Sitters Club” readers may recognize Telgemeier for her own bestselling graphic novels, including "Smile," "Guts" and “Sisters,” among others.

Emily Regnier of Cherry Street Books in Alexandria, Minn., expects the new "Super Specials" to be a big draw for readers. She says the new book feels updated for today while still leaning on the characters and situations readers love.

In this book, the whole club flies to Florida, takes a cruise to the Bahamas and returns for adventures at an amusement park. Each character has a predicament to work through, ranging from awkward run-ins with fellow passengers to new crushes and babysitting triplets on board.

Mark Dayton held a career in public service in Minnesota that spanned five decades.

He is well known for serving two terms the state’s governor, leaving office in 2019. Before that, Dayton’s career included stints as a state agency official, state auditor and U.S. senator.

Dayton talked with MPR News politics editor Brian Bakst to reflect on his career and discuss his new memoir, titled "Perseverance." In this conversation, Dayton recounts his personal challenges and his time as governor. He also revisits his call to increase taxes on the wealthiest Minnesotans — a campaign promise he fulfilled— and his role in legalizing gay marriage in the state.

Also on this episode: election season is underway in Minnesota. On the ticket is an open governor’s race, an open U.S. Senate seat and the full state legislature. Both of the state's major party chairs join the conversation to share their political lay of the land as voting begins.

Guests:

• Mark Dayton served as the 40th governor of Minnesota. He also served as U.S. senator and Minnesota state auditor.

• Alex Plechash is chair of the Minnesota Republican Party.

• Richard Carlbom is chair of the Minnesota DFL Party.

• Dana Ferguson is a politics correspondent for MPR News.

• Peter Cox is a senior politics reporter for MPR News.

Subscribe to the Politics Friday podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.

Marlon James new novel, “The Disappearers,” was published just 18 days ago, and already, this deeply personal novel about gay men in Jamaica has been declared “the novel of the decade, if not the century” by the New York Times. It has also been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize National Book Award.

James, a part-time Macalester College professor and full-time literary phenomenon, kicked off the 2026 season of Talking Volumes last week.

He joined Kerri Miller on the stage of the O’Shaughnessy Auditorium at St. Catherine University in St. Paul on Sept. 12. James told Miller, many of the themes in the book — violence, survival, shame, perseverance, masculinity — are culled from his own life.

Talking Volumes: Marlon James

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Minneapolis singer-songwriter Annie Mack rounded out this moving and intimate evening.

Tickets for the rest of the 2026 season of Talking Volumes are still on sale. Up next: Lucy Foley joins Miller on Sept. 25, to talk about her new novel, “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel,” the brand-new Miss Marple mystery that brings Agatha Christie’s iconic sleuth to a glamorous, snowbound resort in the Swiss Alps.

When’s the last time you had a real, honest to goodness, no holds barred adventure?

Hopefully, the answer is something like yesterday, or at least pretty recently. And if the answer is “I honestly don't remember,” it might be time to start thinking about it — or it may be time to read “I Love You So Many: A Native Memoir of Adventure, Culture, and Family.”

Terria Smith’s new memoir is a tribute to living a full, adventurous life. She’ll be at Milkweed Books in Minneapolis for the book launch on Tuesday.

Smith is a tribal member of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, and a proud Californian. She is the editor of news from Native California magazine and director of the Berkeley Roundhouse, Heyday Publishing's Indigenous storytelling program.

Adventure is something Smith has always longed for. She grew up in a rural reservation community in the California desert and always dreamed of something more.

“When you’re in an environment like that, it does something to your ability to dream,” she said. “You keep thinking that everything is going on someplace else. So you always want to be someplace else.”

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"I Love You So Many"

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As a journalist, travel is now a big part of Smith's life, and she said traveling and having adventures is also a personal passion. Her travel-inspired memoir comes from her adventures in her ancestral homelands of Cuba, Iceland, Guyana and beyond.

She's hopeful, she said, to contribute to an emerging genre of travel books that focus on tribal and Native people.

“A lot of times Native people kind of get stuck with the idea that we're so sad, that we’re so tragic, you know, and all these other kind of ideas like that. That’s part of our history,” she said.

“There’s so much more to us than that. And I'm hoping that this book really shows a different dimension of tribal people and our interests. I hope that people come away. with that, thinking, oh, what a cool adventure, what a cool life.”

Smith said the title came from hearing a Spanish speaking couple use it.

“The title, it kind of symbolizes the people that I love, the places that I love, the experiences that I love. So it’s, I love you so many, so many places, so many people, so many things, so many experiences,” she said.

Smith said she took a memoir writing class, had a writing coach and put in a lot of work to write her book. But as hard as it was, she wrote the book with the idea of “fun” at the forefront of her mind.

“As fun as it is, you still have to go back to, you know, a lot of memories that maybe are unpleasant or painful, or sometimes they're not unpleasant and painful. Sometimes they’re happy memories ... but yeah, I did a lot of work. I’d really like to encourage people to share their stories,” she said.

Smith will share her memoir at Milkweed Books in Minneapolis with a book launch Tuesday from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

These days, Natasha Howard is jersey No. 1 on the Minnesota Lynx. She returned to the team this season after nearly a decade of competing on other WNBA teams and internationally. The last time Howard played for Minnesota, they won the 2017 championship. She won two other titles with the Seattle Storm and was named the 2019 Defensive Player of the Year. Howard is a three-time all star and now, she’s also an author.

Her memoir, “The Vision Through My Lens: My Life in Basketball and Beyond,” is out Tuesday. Howard spoke to Minnesota Now host Nina Moini about her new book and this Lynx season.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

With school back in session, we’re continuing to bring you recommendations for great reads for kids. Pallas Erdrich of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis says her favorite picture book of late is “The Inquisitive Raven,” written by Richard Wagamese and illustrated by Bridget George.

The Ojibwe Canadian writer was known for his novels and memoirs for adult readers, but Erdrich says this picture book, published years after his death in 2017, is pure delight, with illustrations by Bridget George that are “just so soothing.”

“The blessing of the book is about connecting with your ancestors and your grandparents and your parents and just being able to learn from the culture that you come from. Kids have a lot of questions about things, and this opens the door to say it's okay to ask questions about your family history [and] about the things around you; and that when you learn those answers, it can all become part of one larger story,” Erdrich said.

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The Inquisitive Raven

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The book follows Rueben, a curious raven, who asks questions and tries to imitate the other forest animals he meets. On the way, Erdrich says, readers learn Ojibwe words, legends, and lore.

“It’s a dense enough picture book that I think it would be good for reading a kid to sleep, but also one that they could read when they're between five to 10. It’s one that I would keep coming back to myself as a kid, especially because it just has such a beautiful story at the end.”

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In December of 2017, Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat was a mall in south Florida when a loud gunshot broke through the holiday shopping chatter. Believing that a mass shooting was underway, Danticat ran with her fellow shoppers in utter terror. Eventually, she learned the shooting was a hoax. But the trauma that experience provoked was very real.

She works some of that trauma out in her new novel, "Dèy." Taken from the Creole word for “mourning,” the story follows a young mother, Magnolia, who survives an actual mass shooting. But the story is more about what happens next. How do you carry on when your life is marked by a before and an after? How can trauma be contained when life, inextricably, goes on?

“Surviving isn’t the end of the story,” Danticat writes. “It’s where a different one begins.”

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Dèy: A Novel

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Danticat returns to Big Books and Bold Ideas this week to talk with Kerri Miller about why she wanted to weave joy into a book about grief and how trauma is processed best with those you love.

Guest:

• Edwidge Danticat is the author of many books, including “Breath, Eyes, Memory” and “Claire of the Sea Light.” Her new novel is “Dèy.”

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Physical media like vinyl, CDs and even DVDs are all coming back into fashion, but the ancient technique of bookmaking never went out of style in Minneapolis.

The Minnesota Center for Book Arts, known as MCBA, is one of a kind in the state and likely the nation. With over 12,000 square feet of room, the space itself is a combination of three buildings. Even the architecture was built with books in mind, said Laura Brown, resident instructor and partnership coordinator at the center.

“It was designed by architects that worked with a book artist who thinks a lot about buildings as books and sort of the combination of those two things,” she said of the building that bills itself as the largest, most comprehensive book arts center in the world.

So what exactly are book arts?

“We think of it really expansively here,” Brown explained. “It can be anything that has to do with the media of making the different parts a book.”

The letters, numbers and spaces in textbooks, novels and newspapers of a certain time used to all be set by hand and printed via a technique called letterpressing. Each letter was carved onto a block that teams of people would proof-read and then ink and press onto paper for mass production.

The center offers classes and studio workshops including letterpress printing, Japanese papermaking and screen printing. During the Immigration Customs and Enforcement surge this winter, it became a hub for printing posters.

While Brown facilitates tours and classes, she said her favorite part of the job is helping people discover different avenues to art.

“I love sharing things with people,” she said. “They get to understand that being an artist can mean a lot of different things.”

This conversation is a part of our Job Interview series, where we talk to everyday Minnesotans about the rewards and challenges of their work. This following interview has been lightly edited for style and clarity. Click on the audio player to hear the interview.

Official title: Partnership Coordinator and Resident Instructor

What I actually do: I give tours and teach workshops

What you love about your work: I love that I get to be here every day, and I have great coworkers, and I get to tell people about MCBA and get them excited about it, hopefully.

The hardest part: I mean, does anybody really love email?

The hardest thing is saying no, because I can't do everything. Trying to figure out ways to do as much as I possibly can without burning out or overdoing.

What I’ve learned: People think that they’re not artists because they can’t draw representationally, and people come here and they get to be creative and they get to do things that have nothing to do with drawing and they get to understand that being an artist can mean a lot of different things.

Listen to the audio version of this “Job Interview” by clicking the player above.

Correction (Sept. 10, 2026): An earlier version of the story misattributed a statement on the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

K-12 school is back in session across the state, and as usual on Ask a Bookseller, we’re marking the occasion by focusing on books for kids and teen. Char Palmer of Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis recommends the YA graphic novel “Angelica and the Bear Prince,” written by Minneapolis writer and cartoonist Trung Le Nguyen.

High school drama? Sure. Transformative power of theater? Check. This graphic novel follows a burned-out teen, Angelica, who is buoyed by supportive messages on social from ... a bear? Determined to meet the person inside the bear costume who serves as the local theater’s mascot, she gets an internship at the theater.

“It's an adorable story. The art is great, full of whimsy,” says Palmer. “It kind of reads almost like a modern-day fairy tale. So it's realism playing off of the magical kind of whimsy of the theater and the show. It's almost like two different worlds colliding.”

Palmer also appreciates that the storm has good trans representation via one of the main characters.

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