Everybody Reads 2027: Louise Erdrich

Literary Arts is pleased to present New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on March 18, 2027. Her appearance will conclude months of engaging programs and events through Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads program, a community-wide project that promotes shared reading and discussion around a single book. Erdrich’s 2025 novel, The Mighty Red, is the library’s 2027 reading selection and the focal point of this year’s Everybody Reads. From January through March, library-led discussions and activities will center on the book’s themes around love, family, time, and the complexities of being human. About the book: In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people’s lives. In the Red River Valley of North Dakota, several lives revolve around a wedding fraught with desire, jealousy, and uncertainty. 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 own future but will settle for fulfilling his. Her best friend, Hugo, a gentle, red-haired, homeschooled giant, also loves Kismet and is determined to steal her away and build a life together. Kismet’s mother, Crystal, drives a truck for Gary’s family, and on her nightly runs, tunes in to the darkness of late-night radio, experiences visions of guardian angels, and worries about what’s to come, for her daughter and herself. The Mighty Red is Louise Erdrich at her consummate best. A novel of tender humor, disquietude, yearning, community, and family, 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. Human time, deep time, Red River time, and geological time are explored alongside the impact of crises in our own time—climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the economic meltdown of 2008. It is a story about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.