The Imposter by Javier Cercas — not Minneapolis-specific, but the Guthrie Theater's literary culture is reflected in the kind of intellectually serious fiction Minneapolis reads. Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande — begins with a meditation on medical error that resonates with the city's strong medical device and healthcare culture (Mayo Clinic is 90 miles away). For local colour:
The Heart of the City by Hennepin Avenue by Larry Millett — a history of Minneapolis's main commercial boulevard, the street that runs from Uptown through downtown to the river, from the 1880s to the present. Essential context for anyone walking the city.
The Lonely Bones by Alice Sebold was written while the author was in Minneapolis; its sense of being simultaneously inside and outside a place captures something of the city's relationship to its own literary identity.
North of Normal by Cea Sunrise Person — a memoir of growing up in the Canadian wilderness, ending in Minneapolis, that captures the magnetic quality the city has for people from smaller, colder, more isolated places in the upper Midwest.