Name: Book Launch - Laurie Hertzel "Ghosts of Fourth Street"
Start: 2026-04-09T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Ursa Minor Brewing

Book Launch - Laurie Hertzel "Ghosts of Fourth Street"

Zenith Bookstore is excited to celebrate the launch of Duluth native and journalist, Laurie Hertzel’s memoir Ghosts of 4th Street: My Family, A Death, and the Hills of Duluth (University of Minnesota Press). She will be in conversation with best-selling author, Leif Enger on Thursday, April 9th at 7 PM at Ursa Minor Brewing. This is free and open to the public. Laurie will share her new book and her journey. There will be a time for questions from the audience. Ursa Minor has a wonderful menu and beverage selection – so come early for dinner and bring a friend or five! If you are unable to attend, feel free to pre-order a book and we will get it personally signed for you.
Every family has its stories and secrets. Laurie Hertzel’s family had more than its share. At an early age, Laurie, the seventh of the ten Hertzel children, took on the challenge of sorting them out. Not old enough to be one of the Big Kids, yet too old to be with the Three Little Kids, she spent most of her time alone, reading, wandering, and observing her family as they moved around her in their house in Duluth. Though her parents were not warm, there were moments of closeness in those years—gifts of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books and special trips to the dairy for a sundae—but everything shattered after the sudden death of Laurie’s oldest sibling, eighteen-year-old Bobby, when she was just nine years old.
Moving back and forth in time, Laurie reflects on Bobby’s death and what happens to a family’s story when no one can talk about a tragedy and its toll. In Ghosts of Fourth Street, readers witness how the apparition of memories, the shadow of needs unmet, and the spirit of a family once whole all linger long after the death of a child and brother. As Laurie shares her experiences, we see the emergence of her fascination with story and truth as she teaches herself to read and finds solace and inspiration in books amid the tensions and competing agendas within her big, complicated family.
A lifelong journalist, Laurie Hertzel spent fifteen years as the books editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and now reviews for the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Her memoir News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, also published by the University of Minnesota Press, won a Minnesota Book Award. She is a past president of the National Book Critics Circle and has taught at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and The Ohio State University. In 2023, she received the Kerlan Award in recognition of exceptional support for children’s literature. She is a Distinguished Professor of Practice in the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia.
Leif Enger grew up in Osakis, Minnesota, and worked as a reporter for Minnesota Public Radio before writing his bestselling debut novel Peace Like a River, which won the Booksense Award for Fiction and was named one of the Year's Best Books by Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times. Leif has three other bestselling novels. The most recent, I Cheerfully Refuse. He lives with his wife in Duluth, MN.