Standing room only. Wine and cookies. Three degrees below zero outside. Puffy coats hanging from almost every available chair. Magers & Quinn Bookstore in Minneapolis was a warm and welcoming place last week for authors Tessa Hadley — on tour for her latest novel, "Late in the Day" — and Curtis Sittenfeld, a newly transplanted Minnesotan whose latest story collection, "You Think It, I'll Say It," comes out in paperback March 5. Bookstores have been moving away from straight readings and into the realm of discussion. Pairing these two writers was flat-out fascinating. The two met after Sittenfeld chose Hadley's short story "The Surrogate" to read for a New Yorker podcast. "I listened to it in bed, on my phone," said Hadley. "And I never do that." Hadley is known equally well for her stories and her novels, and Sittenfeld wondered how, when she started a piece, she knew which one of those it would be. "I just do," Hadley said, mentioning that on the flight to Minneapolis, "I got the whole of two characters. They just came to me." Sittenfeld wondered if people sometimes worried that Hadley was taking notes on them, to put in her books. Hadley leaned back in her chair and laughed. Of course not, she said. "I'd have no friends!" LAURIE HERTZEL
Heart of cold
Like a good, hardy Canadian, Neil Young never complained about the dangerously cold weather that greeted his four-show run in Minneapolis and shut down many other events in town. He did quip near the start of his third concert, Tuesday at the State Theatre: "Beautiful night, isn't it?" Young later reminisced about when he lived in Winnipeg as a teenager and heard about our city from his friends in the Guess Who, who made the 450-mile trek to record at Kay-Bank Studios in the mid-'60s. "I was thinking to myself, 'Someday I'm gonna go down to Minneapolis,' " he remembered, then paused as if to ponder what took him so long. "A lot of things happened," he simply explained.
CHRIS RIEMENSCHNEIDER
Making 'Tracks'
If you're making a Bob Dylan-based movie, you have to shoot it in his native state, right? The Minnesota Film and TV Board hopes so, but Minnesota often loses projects to Canada or states with bigger tax incentives, so it's no sure thing they can lure Italian director Luca Guadagnino ("Call Me by Your Name") to film "Blood on the Tracks" here. The project is inspired by the album that Dylan wrote and recorded during the breakup of his marriage to Sara Dylan, said Guadagnino, who is in town for a Walker Art Center event Friday. Chloe Grace Moretz is reportedly set to star. "We are doing everything we can to convince them to shoot it in Minnesota," says film board executive director Melodie Bahan. The board has sent Guadagnino photos of the Iron Range to tempt him to the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
CHRIS HEWITT
SPCO to NYC
St. Paul Chamber Orchestra will play the closing concert of the 2019-20 "Great Performers" season at Lincoln Center, one of New York City's most illustrious classical music platforms, featuring such big names such as the Emerson String Quartet, baritone Christian Gerhaher and the London Symphony Orchestra with Simon Rattle. The May 2020 program at Alice Tully Hall — a mellow, wood-paneled space reminiscent of the orchestra's Ordway home — includes Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Haydn's Symphony No. 99, both played without a conductor, an SPCO specialty. Violinist Pekka Kuusisto will be the soloist for Swedish composer Anders Hillborg's "Bach Materia," written for Kuusisto, and will lead Prokofiev's "Classical Symphony."
TERRY BLAIN
Jolly good fellowships
Two Minnesotans — painter and mixed-media artist Dyani White Hawk and author Lesley Nneka Arimah — have been named USA Fellows, a prestigious fellowship with a $50,000 award from the Chicago-based philanthropic organization United States Artists. "It's tremendous, because it's unrestricted, which means they trust the artists to know what's best for themselves," White Hawk said. It will allow her to realize some long-term dreams. "I don't want to say what those are yet ... but we're planning and plotting." Arimah, whose debut collection of short stories, "What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky," won the Kirkus Prize in 2017, is currently on a Shearing fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas.
