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Literature

Community Read: Virtual Author Talk

Join us for a conversation between Aspen Words Literary Prize winning author Louise Erdrich (“The Night Watchman”) and best-selling author (as well as 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Judge) Luis Alberto Urrea. 

Luis Alberto Urrea called “The Night Watchman”:

“A magisterial summation of [Erdrich’s] influential work while at the same time setting a new foundation for the future. A historical novel that is also a story of love, a familial chronicle, a book about Indigenous community and anti-tribal animus, it opens worlds incessantly. It can move from comedic visions of eccentric boxers to terrifying stories of the disappearances of Native women, hints of ghost stories and a prophetic explosion of violence inside the nation’s capital city. It is a wise and transformative masterwork.”


“The Night Watchman” by Louise Erdrich

“Louise Erdrich’s novel ‘The Night Watchman’ is a magisterial summation of her influential work while at the same time setting a new foundation for the future. A historical novel that is also a story of love, a familial chronicle, a book about Indigenous community and anti-tribal animus, it opens worlds incessantly. It can move from comedic visions of eccentric boxers to terrifying stories of the disappearances of Native women, hints of ghost stories and a prophetic explosion of violence inside the nation’s capital city. It is a wise and transformative masterwork.” – 2021 Judge Luis Alberto Urrea

Harper
ISBN: 9780062671189
Get this book: Bookshop.org

Louise Erdrich is the author of sixteen novels, volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her fiction has won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa, lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

About the Moderator

Luis Alberto Urrea is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and the best-selling author of 18 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His most recent book is “The House of Broken Angels,” a New York Times Notable Book of the year, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recently acquired by the Hulu network for a series. His novel “Into the Beautiful North” is a selection of the NEA Big Reads program. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.


The Community Read, presented by Aspen Words and Pitkin County Library, strives to celebrate literature, unite readers around a work of fiction and ignite meaningful conversation on the vital social issues explored in the novel “The Night Watchman” by Louise Erdrich, winner of the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize. 

“The Night Watchman” is also available through:

Event information
Date
Mon Aug 2, 2021
5:30pm - 6:30pm EDT
Location
Virtual