Python's Kiss (Louise Erdrich)

"[A] spectacular collection. . . . A staggering sense of empathy infuses the stories. With its range of voices and styles, this puts Erdrich's powers on full display." - Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, a captivating collection of short stories

It was as though I was chosen-marked out by the python's kiss for wisdom or maybe sorrow. Or perhaps, I think now, a sense of the ridiculous in extremes of experience. Also, I hoped for a long life.

Written over the past two decades, Louise Erdrich's magnificent story collection features a range of characters-a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass, immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged, and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father.

Accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Aza Erdrich Abe-an intimate and revelatory creative collaboration between mother and daughter-these stories offer an opportunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America's most important writers.

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the award-winning author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.