The Big Read Returns to Wichita!

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)