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The Big Read Returns to Wichita!

There There book cover

The NEA Big Read: Wichita selection for 2024 is There There by Tommy Orange, a New York Times bestseller and one of the top 10 best books of the year. This novel – which grapples with the complex history of Native Americans; with an inheritance of profound spirituality; and with a plague of addiction, abuse and suicide – follows 12 characters, each of whom has private reasons for traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow.

Official Announcement

Praise for There There

  • "Groundbreaking, extraordinary" (The New York Times)
  • "The year's most galvanizing debut novel" (Entertainment Weekly)
  • "Masterful... white-hot... devastating" (The Washington Post)
  • "Sublimely render(ing) the truth of experiences that are passed over" (San Francisco Chronicle)
  • "Brilliantly, furiously, magnificently, tragically, the story of America" (Elle)
  • "There There drops on us like a thunderclap; the big, booming, explosive sound of twenty-first-century literature finally announcing itself" (novelist Marlon James)

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