By JEFFREY COLLINS, KATE PAYNE and PATRICK WHITTLE Associated Press

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A crisis unfolded in western North Carolina as officials rushed to get more water, food and other supplies to flood-stricken areas without power and cellular service Monday, three days after Hurricane Helene ripped across the U.S. Southeast. The death toll from the storm reached the triple digits.

At least 107 people in six states were killed. A North Carolina county that includes the mountain city of Asheville reported 30 people killed. Georgia’s death count was raised Monday from 17 to 25.

North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, predicted the toll would rise as rescuers and other emergency workers reached areas isolated by collapsed roads, failing infrastructure and widespread flooding.

Supplies were being airlifted to the region around the isolated city of Asheville. Buncombe County Manager Avril Pinder pledged that she would have food and water to the city by Monday.

“We hear you. We need food and we need water,” Pinder said on a Sunday call with reporters. “My staff has been making every request possible to the state for support and we’ve been working with every single organization that has reached out. What I promise you is that we are very close.”

Asheville’s water system was severely damaged. Residents walked with buckets to a creek to get water to flush toilets, carefully watching their steps where a wall of water three days before ripped away all of the trees and ground, leaving only mud.

Neighbors shared food and water and comforted each other. “That’s the blessing so far in this,” Sommerville Johnston said outside her home.

Officials warned that rebuilding from the widespread loss of homes and property would be lengthy and difficult. The storm upended life throughout the Southeast.

Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, raised that state’s death toll Monday to 25, telling reporters that the storm “literally spared no one.” Most people in and around Augusta, a city of about 200,000 people near the South Carolina border, were still without power Monday, and Kemp and other officials tried to reassure residents that they felt their misery.

Deaths also were reported in Florida, South Carolina and Virginia.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said Monday that hundreds of roads were closed across western North Carolina and that shelters across the area were housing more than 1,000 people.

Cooper implored residents in western North Carolina to avoid travel, both for their own safety and to keep roads clear for emergency vehicles. More than 50 search teams spread throughout the region in search of stranded people.

One rescue effort involved saving 41 people north of Asheville. Another mission focused on saving a single infant. The teams found people through both 911 calls and social media messages, North Carolina National Guard Adjutant General Todd Hunt said.

Video showed a mass of debris, including overturned pontoon boats and splintered wooden docks, covering the surface of Lake Lure, a picturesque spot tucked between the mountains outside Asheville.

President Joe Biden described the impact of the storm as “stunning” and said he would visit the area this week as long as it does not disrupt rescues or recovery work. In a brief exchange with reporters, he said the administration is giving states “everything we have” to help with their response to the storm.

Hurricane Helene roared ashore late Thursday in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane with 140 mph (225 kph) winds. A weakened Helene quickly moved through Georgia, then soaked the Carolinas and Tennessee with torrential rains that flooded creeks and rivers and strained dams.

There have been hundreds of water rescues, including in rural Unicoi County in East Tennessee, where dozens of patients and staff were plucked by helicopter from a hospital rooftop Friday.

More than 2 million homeowners and other utility customers were still without power Sunday night. South Carolina had the most outages and Gov. Henry McMaster asked for patience as crews dealt with widespread snapped power poles.

“We want people to remain calm. Help is on the way, it is just going to take time,” McMaster told reporters outside the airport in Aiken County.

Begging for help in North Carolina as that help is slow to arrive

The storm unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina. One community, Spruce Pine, was doused with over 2 feet (61 centimeters) of rain from Tuesday through Saturday.

Jessica Drye Turner in Texas had begged for someone to rescue her family members stranded on their rooftop in Asheville amid rising floodwaters. “They are watching 18-wheelers and cars floating by,” Turner wrote in an urgent Facebook post on Friday.

But in a follow-up message Saturday, Turner said help had not arrived in time to save her parents, both in their 70s, and her 6-year-old nephew. The roof collapsed and the three drowned.

“I cannot convey in words the sorrow, heartbreak and devastation my sisters and I are going through,” she wrote.

The state was sending water supplies and other items toward Buncombe County and Asheville, but mudslides blocking Interstate 40 and other highways prevented supplies from making it. The county’s own water supplies were on the other side of the Swannanoa River, away from where most of the 270,000 people in Buncombe County live, officials said.

Law enforcement was making plans to send officers to places that still had water, food or gas because of reports of arguments and threats of violence, the county sheriff said.

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell toured south Georgia on Sunday and planned to be in North Carolina Monday.

“It’s still very much an active search and rescue mission” in western North Carolina, Criswell said. “And we know that there’s many communities that are cut off just because of the geography” of the mountains, where damage to roads and bridges have cut off certain areas.

Biden on Saturday pledged federal government help for Helene’s “overwhelming” devastation. He also approved a disaster declaration for North Carolina, making federal funding available for affected individuals.

Storm-battered Florida digs out, residents gather for church

In Florida’s Big Bend, some lost nearly everything they own. Some churches canceled regular services Sunday while others like Faith Baptist Church in Perry opted to worship outside.

Standing water and tree debris still covers the grounds of Faith Baptist Church. The church called on parishioners to come “pray for our community” in a message posted to the congregation’s Facebook page.

“We have power. We don’t have electricity,” Immaculate Conception Catholic Church parishioner Marie Ruttinger said. “Our God has power. That’s for sure.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday that it looked “like a bomb went off” after viewing splintered homes and debris-covered highways from the air.

In eastern Georgia near the border with South Carolina, officials notified Augusta residents on Sunday morning that water service would be shut off for 24 to 48 hours because trash and debris blocked the ability to pump water.

With at least 25 killed in South Carolina, Helene was the deadliest tropical cyclone for the state since Hurricane Hugo made landfall north of Charleston in 1989, killing 35 people.

Moody’s Analytics said it expects $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage.

Climate change has exacerbated conditions that allow such storms to thrive, rapidly intensifying in warming waters and turning into powerful cyclones sometimes within hours.

Tropical Storm Kirk forms in the Atlantic and could become a powerful hurricane

Tropical Storm Kirk formed Monday in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and is expected to become a “large and powerful hurricane” by Tuesday night or Wednesday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The storm was located about 700 miles (1,125 kilometers) west of the Cabo Verde Islands with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph (70 kph). There were no coastal watches or warnings in effect, and the storm system was not a threat to land.

Whittle reported from Portland, Maine, and Payne reported from Perry, Florida. Haya Panjwani in Washington, Kate Brumback in Atlanta, and Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed.

She hadn’t meant to fall in love with anybody, and was she even in love at all? To be sure, something had clicked. Hugo made her laugh about herself. Laughing made her delirious. In Gary’s case, there was nothing like being rejected and then embraced. She’d been invisible, at best sneered at by most of the cool guys. Then suddenly adored by Gary, who’d been way too anxious to marry her. — from “The Mighty Red”

(Harper via AP)

Louise Erdrich’s “The Mighty Red” was touted early on as one of the big books of the season and this Minneapolis Pulitzer Prize winner exceeds expectations. No wonder BookPage speculated that her 19th novel “might just be a new American classic.”

In her first novel since “The Sentence” (2021), Erdrich displays all her writing talents in a multifaceted story set during hardships caused by the 2008 recession in a small town in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, named for the north-flowing Red River. She holds together human loves and foibles, hard-working people, destruction of the land, growing and processing sugar beets, life in a rural community, all surrounding a story about teen and mother-daughter love. Told in short chapters, some only a few paragraphs on the page, it’s tender-hearted, often funny and sometimes dark.

It begins with Native American Crystal hauling sugar beets from field to warehouse on the night shift. Her smart, bored, restless daughter, Kismet, is suddenly noticed by football hero Gary Geist, son of the richest farmer in the area. Kismet is kind of drawn to Gary because he makes her feel important and she thinks he needs her, but she’s also in love with Hugo, a big, smart, home-schooled guy who works at his mother’s bookstore. (Erdrich owns independent Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.)

Hovering over much of the story is a secret about an earlier accident involving Gary, which he won’t discuss. Against her better judgment, Kismet marries Gary and we meet his mother, who relies on Kismet to cook and clean. The marriage doesn’t go well and Kismet wants to go home to Crystal. Her mother worries about Kismet living at the Geist farm but she has her own problems after her theater-loving husband disappears with money from the church’s renovation fund and many in the town turn against her.

Louise Erdrich (Thomas Samson / AFP via Getty Images)

There are plenty of other characters, including Gary’s friends who were with him when the secret “something” happened, and women attending a hilarious book club meeting where they drink wine and snipe at one another while the harried hostess tries to keep the conversation on track.

Running through the narrative is the land, almost a character itself. Hugo goes off the oil patch for work that brings fracking into the story. The older farmers see what is happening to the soil when chemicals are sprayed on the fields, but younger ones like Gary see the future as organic.

Here Erdrich pulls these threads together:

“In some places, lambsquarters is considered the Prince of Greens, one of the most nutritious greens ever analyzed; it was one of the earliest agricultural crops of the Americas. It also resembles amaranth, but the brothers rarely spoke of that. The rough cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing the sugar beet, perhaps the least nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious.”

Describing the plot of “The Mighty Red” can’t capture Erdrich’s poetic writing about hopes, dreams, hallucinations, fears and tragedy.. Best of all, she brings readers into 2023 to let us know what happened to the characters that have our sympathy.

“The Mighty Red” (Harper, $32) earned starred reviews from Kirkus (“deft, almost winsome”), Library Journal and Publishers Weekly “(tender and capacious”).

Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa (Ojibwe) and the author of novels, poetry, children’s books and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel “The Night Watchman” won the Pulitzer Prize and “The Round House” won the National Book Award. “Love Medicine” and “LaRose” received the National Book Critics Circle award.

She will discuss her novel at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Fitzgerald Theater, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul, in the Talking Volumes reading series. $30, $25, $22.50. Go to mprevents.org.

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Take your choice today. We’ve got a timely memoir by Minnesota’s first woman lieutenant governor, three stories of crime in old St. Paul, and selected/new poetry inspired by “up North.”

“Rise to the Challenge: A Memoir of Politics, Leadership, and Love”: by Marlene M. Johnson (University of Minnesota Press, $24.95)

My inauguration was a breakthrough for women in state government and a step on the journey to a public service career that I had envisioned for myself, yet it had happened so fast it was hard to believe. I felt ready for a new challenge, while at the same time I was aware that I had much to learn and that my long-held professional and personal insecurities lingered. — from “Rise to the Challenge”

(Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press)

At the Brothers Deli in Edina Rudy Perpich ate chocolate cate and Marlene Johnson sipped coffee while the former governor invited Johnson to be his running mate in his 1982 campaign to reclaim the office he’d held from 1976 to 1979. That invitation sent Johnson on a journey that would make her Minnesota’s first woman lieutenant governor, serving from 1983 to 1991.

“I was excited to get started and determined to do all I could to do a good job and help create more opportunities for women and minorities in state government,” Johnson writes in her new memoir.

Johnson’s political/personal story couldn’t be more timely as we wait to see if the United States will have its first female president in Kamala Harris. If Harris wins, Gov. Tim Walz will become vice president and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan will be Minnesota’s first female governor.

Now 78, Johnson began honing her organizational skills during her grade school days in Braham, Minn., when she founded the Helping Hands Club to visit elderly women. Later, she was leader of the Young DFL organization at Macalester College and organized for DFL candidates at the precinct level. She championed and worked for women such as Linda Berglin, elected to the Minnesota House in 1972.

Johnson first met Rudy Perpich in 1977 when she set up a meeting with the governor and foreign journalists from the Macalester World Press Institute. The governor’s staff insisted he had no time for a meeting but Johnson persisted (which she was good at). Perpich was so impressed he offered four seats on his plane for that evening’s trip to Wadena. Three would go to institute fellows and the fourth to Johnson.

Perpich felt that Johnson as his runnng mate was “the natural outcome of my range of experiences over the past 25 years,” she writes.

Since Johnson didn’t come from the Twin Cities, she built a circle of influential women supporters through business contacts as co-founder of a marketing/publicity business, Split Infinitive, as well as co-founding the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners and the Minnesota Women’s Campaign Fund, a nonpartisan organization that raised money to support pro-choice women running for Congress and the U.S. Senate. (For those who remember local feminism in the 1970s, Johnson’s take on tension between the DFL Feminist Caucus and the Minnesota Women’s Political Caucus is particularly interesting.)

From the beginning of Perpich’s campaign he made it a point to empower Johnson, whom he tasked as lieutenant governor with leading Minnesota’s tourism strategy as an economic-development tool and chairing an appointments commission to advise him on candidates for all the state’s boards and commissions.

Marlene M. Johnson (John Kaul / University of Minnesota Press)

Johnson acknowledges some of Perpich’s Iron Range supporters were not pleased with her being on the ticket: “I was a young, pro-choice female whom they didn’t know. They could not understand how I would be an asset to the governor’s election.”

Perpich stressed to Johnson that she had an open invitation to attend any meetings on his schedule unless specifically told otherwise. He also urged Johnson to resist the legislative pressure to give up the separate lieutenant governor’s office space. (Although Johnson doesn’t say so, this was a smart power move because offices give status.)

By the early 1980s Johnson was open to a relationship, which she found in 1983 when she met Swedish businessman Peter Frankel, whom she married. They worked out a hectic schedule when they lived in Washington, D.C., and Sweden.

Johnson transitioned out of politics after Perpich lost the election to Republican Arne Carlson. During their last two years in office, Johnson and Perpich were not on good terms after he accused her of being disloyal to him. Surprised and dismayed, Johnson pointed out to the governor her loyalty and all the ways in which she had enhanced their administration.

The second half of Johnson’s memoir pivots to her private life as she writes of spending happy times at her and her husband’s summer house in Sweden. Then, her life changed again when Peter fell and was left with a traumatic brain injury. She had to accept that her best friend and strongest supporter would spend the rest of his life in a nursing facility in Sweden. While working as executive director/CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, Johnson embarked on a schedule of working in Washington three weeks a month and spending the other week supervising her husband’s care in Sweden. She kept that exhausting pace for nine years, until Peter’s death in 2019.

Johnson lives in Washington, D.C., where she is a board member of the Washington Office on Latin America. In 1988 she was awarded the Royal Order of the Polar Star by the Kingdom of Sweden, established in 1748 to recognize personal efforts for Sweden or for Swedish interests.

Johnson will launch her book at 7 p.m. Monday at the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 301 19th Ave. S., Mpls. In conversation with Lori Sturdevant, who covered state politics and government at the Star Tribune and is the author or co-author of 12 books about notable Minnesotans. Free, but registration required. Go to eventbrite.com/e/rise-to-the-challenge-book-launch-with-marlene-m-johnson-tickets-972429963197.

“Mysterious Tales of Old St. Paul: Three Cases Featuring Shadwell Rafferty”: by Larry Millett (University of Minnesota Press, $24.95)

Shadwell Rafferty is a big, friendly Irishman, co-owner of a saloon in St. Paul’s swanky Ryan Hotel in the late 1800s. He’s curious about things and knows a lot about what goes on in St. Paul thanks to gossip among drinkers he serves. This information helps when he turns part-time detective aided by his African-American friend and partner Thomas “Wash” Washington.

Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press

Millett, a former Pioneer Press reporter and architecture critic, wrote nine novels featuring Rafferty and the great Sherlock Holmes. In the final book, “Rafferty’s Last Case” (2023), Rafferty solves his own murder thanks to the notes he kept. Now Millett gives us three novellas (shorter than a novel, longer than a short story) set before Rafferty met the Great Detective.

The first story, “Death in the News,” begins with someone tampering with the big sign above the Pioneer Press building, amusing staffs at rival papers The Globe and Dispatch. Not so amusing is the deaths of journalists. The last story, “The Gold King,” involves greed and an elaborate scheme for revenge. The middle story, “The Birdman of Summit Avenue,” is a gentler tale although it does involve a murder. A crabby old recluse has turned his acres into a haven for for birds. Then he meets a little girl from the West Side Flats who loves birds as much as he does and they become friends. When the man is accused of murdering a boy he’d chased from his property for shooting at the birds, Rafferty tries to find the real killer. It ends with a tender epilogue that’s unusual in crime fiction.

Larry Millett (Matt Schmidt)

Because Millett wrote about architecture for the Pioneer Press as well as books on the subject, he is able to bring vivid life to 19th-century St. Paul, describing lost buildings such as the Ryan Hotel and those still standing, including James J. Hill’s mansion. He has fun writing about rivalries between the city’s three newspapers. Characters range from bigoted businessmen who live on Summit Avenue to petty criminals. Appearing in all the stories are Rafferty’s friend Det. Pat Nolan, the only member of the St. Paul police department who knows what he’s doing, and Merry Mike Gallagher, the corrupt police chief who laughs when he pounds a miscreant with a hickory stick.

Millett will launch his book at a free reading at 6 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 6, at Saint City Catering, 218 E. Seventh St., St. Paul, presented by SubText Books.

“Cotton Grass: New and Selected Poems of the North”: by Bart Sutter (Nodin Press, $19.95)

I’ve hoped my nature poems might serve among what William Stafford called the “millions of intricate moves” to arrive at justice — in this case, a way of living in and with the natural world rather than destroying it — and ourselves — with unbridled cleverness, arrogance, and greed. The longer I lived with the poem ‘”Cotton Grass” the more the plant — growing in out-of-the-way places yet lovely to discover, self-propagating, and surprisingly tenacious — the more the plant seemed symbolic of poetry itself. — from “Cotton Grass”

Courtesy of Nodin Press

Bart Sutter says his collection of new and selected poems represents “a half century’s engagement with the nature of our region.” By that he means the environment in and around Duluth, where he lives, and northern Minnesota into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. A former Duluth poet laureate, Sutter has explored the back roads, trails, rivers, lakes and bogs of the North, returning with inspiration for poems about otters, moose and bobolinks to raccoons, as in this poem: “Abracadabra, out from behind/The trunk of a monumental white pine,/A foursome of small raccoons appears as one,/Shambling, stumbling, nudging and bumping/Each other, chirring and grumbling, muttering/and rumbling…”

“Cotton Grass” (a cloud-like plant that thrives in northern climes), is made up of selections from Sutter’s previous collections as well as new work. These are poems for people who think they don’t like poetry, easily understood and touching to us Minnesotans who share the poet’s love of the natural world and its opportunities, from canoeing to fishing and hiking.

Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn calls Sutter’s poetry “light years away (thank God) from post-modern tactics; one might even say Sutter’s aesthetic is pre-modern. There are many poems with rhyme and meter, an unabashed celebration of nature, and most amazingly, a healthy sampling of what we see little of these days, the affirmative poem.”

Bart Sutter (Courtesy of Nodin Press)

Sutter also writes essays, stories and plays. He is the only writer to win Minnesota Book Awards in three categories: “My Father’s War and Other Stories” in fiction, “The Book of Names” in poetry, and “Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map” in creative nonfiction. At the end of October he and his brother, Ross, will take their Sutter Brothers poetry-and-music show to 23 public libraries in northern Minnesota.

Sutter will introduce “Cotton Grass” at 7 p.m. Monday at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls., with guest poet Tim Nolan. He’ll read at 2 p.m. Oct. 6 in the Cracked Walnut Literary Bridges series with Philip S. Bryant, Jody Lulich and Dylan Hicks at Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul.

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JULIE AYER: Member of the Minnesota Orchestra for 36 years introduces “Defying the Silence,” a labor history about how some of the world’s finest musicians walked a picket line and how local music lovers rallied around them. The musicians were locked out Oct. 1, 2012, starting the longest work stoppage in American orchestral labor history. The author is a professional violinist, arts advocate and historian. 6 p.m. Thursday, Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul.

CHAPMAN/COY: Ty Chapman, who writes children’s books and poetry, and John Coy, award-winning author of books for children and young adults, launch “Stokes: The Brief Career of the NBA’s First Black Superstar,” the story of Maurice Stokes, who played basketball in the mid-1950s and is not as well known as he should be in part because of a career-ending injury. 6 p.m. Tuesday, Red Balloon Bookshop, 891 Grand Ave., St. Paul. Register at redballoonbookshop.com.

DORER/HOMSTAD: Kari Lie Dorer and Torild Homstad discuss “Muus v. Muus,” a newly translated American edition of a book first published in Norway, about a wife’s lawsuit against her husband in 1880s Minnesota that shook the Norwegian-American community because in the eyes of the Norwegian Synod she had erred by not bringing her complaint to the congregation. She was not allowed to speak, even though in America laws regarding inheritance were on her side. Co-published with the Norwegian American Historical Association on the occasion of Northfield-based St. Olaf College’s sesquicentennial. Dorer holds the King Olav V Chair of Scandinavian American Studies at St. Olaf and Homstad has taught Norwegian at St. Olaf and the University of Minnesota. 7 p.m. Wednesday, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls. Registration required: magersandquinn.com.

SARAH JAFFE: New Orleans-based writer/reporter and social critic introduces “From the Ashes,” about the politics of grief in an era marked by loss, showing us how we can find our humanity once more as we face issues ranging from COVID deaths to planetary disasters. In conversation with Rod Adams, founder/executive director for New Justice Project in Minnesota. 7 p.m. Tuesday, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.

(Courtesy of Milkweed Editions)

AMY/DAVE FREEMAN: Ely-based National Geographic Adventurers of the Year host a program titled Vote for the Environment, with Wendy Bennett, Alex Falconer, Larry Kraft and Becky Rom, inspired by the Freemans’ book “North American Odyssey: 12,000 Miles Across the Continent by Kayak, Canoe, and Dogsled.” Free. Hosted by publisher Milkweed Editions. 6 p.m. Wednesday, Open Book, 1011 Washington Ave. S., Mpls.

MINDY MEJIA: Discusses “A World of Hurt,” widely praised second in her Iowa Mysteries series (after “To Catch a Storm”), in which FBI informant Kara Johnson, who is immune from pain, teams up with Iowa police officer Max Summerlin, who is in constant pain, to bust a drug-trafficking operation. In Totally Criminal Cocktail Hour author series presented by Valley Bookseller of Stillwater. In conversation with Minnesota thriller writer Matt Goldman, 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Lowell Inn, 217 N. Main St., Stillwater. $10. Go to valleybookseller.com/event.

CRISTINA OXTRA: Minnesota Filipino American who writes books for young readers including the Teen Titans Go! Multiverse Adventure Series, launches her debut picture book, “What Lolo Wants,” dedicated to her grandfather who taught her how to draw. In celebration of Filipino American Heritage Month. 5 p.m. Saturday, Red Balloon Bookshop, 891 Grand Ave., St. Paul.

RANDY RIBAY: National Book Award finalist for “Patron Saints of Nothing” introduces his new young adult novel “Everything We Never Had,” about four generations of Filipino American boys grappling with identity, masculinity, and their fraught father-son relationships, published in celebration of Filipino American Heritage Month. In conversation with Cristina Oxtra. 6 p.m. Thursday, Red Balloon Bookshop, 891 Grand Ave., St. Paul. Register at redballoonbookshop.com.

MARCIE RENDON: Discusses her latest novel, “Where They Last Saw Her,” the story of a Native American woman who has had enough of disappearing Native women and empowers other women to stop abuse. 6 p.m. Wednesday, Union Depot, 214 E. Fourth St., presented by Story Line Books.

ELIOT SCHREFER: Introduces his new gender-bending young adult novel “The Brightness Between Us,” sequel to his American Library Association Stonewall Honor book “The Darkness Outside Us.” In conversation with Minnesota young adult author Anne Ursu. 6 p.m. Wednesday, Red Balloon Bookshop, 891 Grand Ave., St. Paul,. Register at redballoonbookshop.com.

STEPHEN SHASKAN: One of Minnesota’s favorite children’s writers introduces “Pizza and Taco: Best Christmas Ever!” in which the goofy pals decide it’s never too early to make their Christmas wish lists. All they have to do is be super-nice and well-behaved. 10:30 a.m. Saturday, Red Balloon Bookshop, 891 Grand Ave., St. Paul. Registration suggested: redballoonbookshop.com.

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