Everyone was taking a shift alone so they could assist with curbside pickup and advise people of books they might like.” Erdrich added, “I just want to say that we’re fine now, we’ve been busy, we’re getting a lot of love. She said, “I was trying to figure out how to keep everyone at the bookstore safe. In a phone interview, Erdrich talked about how her store, Birchbark Books & Native Arts, endured its own dark time because of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, which happened only a few miles away. Louise says, “This is a dark time for bookstores and we probably won’t make it.” Then she offers Tookie a job. Her answer: “ Almanac of the Dead,” by Leslie Marmon Silko. Tookie, an Ojibwe woman with a checkered past, shows up for a job interview with Louise (no last name), who wears vintage oval eyeglasses, a beaded hairclip and “a general air of tolerance.” Instead of inquiring about her prospective employee’s credentials - or her stint in prison - Louise asks Tookie what she’s reading.

The Pulitzer Prize winner even deputizes her on-page doppelgänger to hire her protagonist at an unnamed Minneapolis bookstore that sounds a lot like the one Erdrich owns in real life. But how often do you encounter the writer as a character in his or her own story? Rarely - probably because it’s a daring feat, one Louise Erdrich pulls off in “ The Sentence,” which just spent a week on the hardcover fiction list. METAVERSE When you’re reading a novel, you’ll find its author’s fingerprints on every page.

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