Hi, I'm Lovar Burton and this is Lovar Burton Reads.

In every episode I hand-pick a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.

The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope you will too.

Earlier all, today's story is another one that just hit me like a brick.

It's by the author Louise Urdrich who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction earlier this

year for her novel The Night Watchmen.

Louise is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band and has written many novels as well as

volumes of poetry, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood.

She also runs Birch Bark Books, an independent bookstore in Minnesota.

Now much of Louise's fiction, including this short story, considers and reflects aspects

of her mixed heritage, which is German through her father and French and Ojibwe through

her mother.

She's got a new novel out on November 9th called The Sentence, which can be preordered

right now from the usual places, including your local independent bookstore.

Don't forget our indie bookstores.

It is appropriately enough a very funny ghost story.

Set in an indie bookstore.

So look forward to that.

Now, about the years of my birth, which was first published in the New Yorker, our protagonist,

Brenda, who was nicknamed Tuppy as a child, is someone I believe to have great inner strength

and vulnerability all at once.

Tuppy is a white child adopted by a Native American family.

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