Talking Volumes with Louise Erdrich

MPR News and the Star Tribune are proud to announce the 25th season of Talking Volumes. Talking Volumes is hosted by award-winning MPR News journalist Kerri Miller. We are happy to announce that we will be back in the historic Fitzgerald Theater this fall for four special events. We have three authors with big new book releases, and we wrap up our season with Kate DiCamillo talking about the four new books she released this past year. We also have a $25 anniversary ticket price for MPR Members and Star Tribune Subscribers.

About the Author

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the award-winning author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

About the book

Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich returns with The Mighty Red, a novel of ordinary life and extraordinary love set in a time of economic and ecological precariousness. Time is the driving pulse of this multilayered novel, set in the Red River Valley of North Dakota: human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths are set against the speed of climate change, the deple­tion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008–2009.

In a small town in North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed goth who can’t read her future but seems to resolve his. Hugo, a gentle, red-haired, homeschooled giant, is also in love with Kis­met. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home-wrecker. Kismet’s mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary’s family, and on her nightly runs, tunes in to the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucina­tory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape and eating the native weeds growing in your back­yard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.