Python's Kiss

'Amazing. The first three stories are the best things I've ever read' Ann Patchett, via Reese's Book Club 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. 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, 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, these stories offer an oppor­tunity to celebrate the wisdom and wide-ranging imagination of one of America's most important writers.

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Love Medicine and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Night Watchman won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. The Sentence was shortlisted for The Women's Prize for Fiction 2022. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. A ghost lives in her creaky old house.