April 17, 2015 - MPR’s Marianne Combs reports on Internationally acclaimed author Louise Erdrich’s first-ever show of visual art, titled "Asynchronous Reading." Combs interviews Erdrich about items in the exhibit.
December 16, 2014 - Northfield native Siri Hustvedt's latest novel "The Blazing World" examines the life and works of a maverick artist who goes to extreme lengths to gain the recognition she believes she deserves. It's turning up on many best books of 2014 lists. It also examines the overwhelming power of public perception in the art world.
September 22, 2014 - Poetry has long fascinated former Star Tribune editorial board member Jim Lenfestey, both as a reader and a writer. Back in 1970 a bookseller gave him a collection of poems by Han Shan, or Cold Mountain, a Chinese poet who lived 1400 years ago.
September 12, 2014 - A new production called "Marcus; Or the secret of sweet" opens this weekend at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It tells the story of a young man wrestling with his identity as he comes of age in a small town in the Louisiana bayou.
August 5, 2014 - In her new novel, "Everything I Never Told You," novelist Celeste Ng quickly plunges readers into the depths of a family tragedy.Late one night, after the Lee family spends a seemingly normal evening filled with the tiny joys of parents and children, 16-year-old Lydia in a pond near the family home. No one in her family, the author tells her readers, will remember their fleeting moments of happiness."Instead they will dissect this last evening for years to come," Ng writes. "What did they miss that they should have seen? What small gesture forgotten might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure."In "Everything I Never Told You" Ng explores misery of losing a child, while also using uses the story to examine the challenges of a mixed family in the Midwest during the 1970s, a time when interracial marriages and their offspring made attracted unwelcome and sometimes hostile attention. She will read from the novel at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Magers and Quinn Bookstore in Minneapolis.Ng said the book grew out of a story her husband told her about a little girl he knew who nearly drowned when she fell in a lake. The story touched Ng because of her own fears of the water, and she began writing about the implications for the family. As she wrote, the story developed and became about a lot more.In writing the novel, Ng, 33, began drawing on her own background as an Asian-American who grew up in Pittsburgh and in the Shaker Heights, Ohio, area near Cleveland. But she decided to set the story in the 1970s. "That seemed like a very poignant era to me," Ng said. "For her to see her daughter have a lot of opportunities that for her had maybe now passed."
June 20, 2014 - MPR’s Euan Kerr profiles Pooja Goswami Pavan, a Minneapolis-based, north Indian classical singer. A collection of ancient Sufi love songs re-imagined for a modern audience are highlighted.
June 6, 2014 - In a small park near the Cathedral in St. Paul, a crowd of children and adults sit in front of a puppet theater.They plopped down on the grass to see "Tucker's Robot," a high-energy slapstick tale of two pals who decide to build a robot. The show is part of the Driveway Tour by Open Eye Figure Theatre, which began 11 years ago as a practical solution to a sticky problem.
June 3, 2014 - For more than 20 years Bemidji writer Kent Nerburn has walked a fine line. He's tried to respectfully explore Native American culture as a white author.His books "Neither Wolf nor Dog" and "Wolf at Twilight," tell of his complex relationship with a Lakota elder named Dan. He's now completed the trilogy with "The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo" which delves into Native spirituality. Nerburn says it was also the most difficult of the trilogy to write. "In my own way, with such talents or such spiritual capabilities as I had, I prayed for guidance on this."As in the others in the series the new book tells of a road trip Nerburn takes with his friend Dan. Dan is a real person, a Lakota elder approaching the end of his life. Like all the characters in Nerburn's trilogy, though, Dan is not his real name. Nerburn has renamed everyone except himself.Dan is surrounded by a group of very protective friends and relatives. They regularly warn off Nerburn if they think he is getting too close, telling him he has no place in the native community. "The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo" Courtesy New World LibraryHowever, for reasons Nerburn doesn't understand, Dan keeps pulling him back. The man needs to resolve some questions before he dies -- most importantly, what happened to his sister. She was taken to a boarding school and never returned. Dan wants Nerburn's help to find out what happened.In the first half of the 20th century the U.S. government placed thousands of native children in such schools. They were often far from their homes and families, and the experience scarred entire generations. In the new book, Nerburn writes about a place that may have been worse.
November 8, 2013 - When hard-living, hard-partying Texas cowboy Ron Woodroof received some very bad news in 1985, he likely had no idea that his life would inspire a movie.
July 16, 2013 - A new novel from a Minneapolis small press links blends elements of a spy thriller, a romance, history, philosophy and environmental concerns about the future of the planet. The New York Times raved about author J.M. Ledgard's "Submergence " calling it "a book obsessed with unexplored depths, whether of self, of world conflict or of the ocean." Euan Kerr reports Coffee House Press says the national publishing houses passed over the book, but it's exactly the material Coffee House seeks.