Fiction June 17, 2020

“I don’t know why I keep coming back here,” muses Marion Lafournier, the gay Ojibwe man at the center of Dennis E. Staples’s debut novel, This Town Sleeps. He’s talking about Geshig, a small town at the center of the Languille Lake reservation in northern Minnesota. Despite feeling like an outsider as the town’s only openly gay resident, Marion cannot resist the pull to return home. “The first chance I had to move out of Geshig and off the Languille Lake reservation, I took it,” Marion explains. “I moved to the Twin Cities for college. And then as a few