Python's Kiss - by Louise Erdrich (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"[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.

Review Quotes

"Pulitzer winner Erdrich dives deep into the American psyche in this 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)

"These profound and resplendent stories are shaped by wit, artistry, and wisdom as Erdrich traces the weave of life that intricately meshes humans with each other, animals, earth, sky, and spirit." - Booklist (Starred Review)

"This new short story collection by national treasure Louise Erdrich took two decades to write and it shows in the range and depth of the stories it contains. They follow a tribal newsletter editor, immigrant farmers, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers and so many more." - People magazine

"In a stunning collection of 13 stories, Louise Erdrich, winner of both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, injects jarring, transformative moments into otherwise ordinary lives." - Time magazine

"Beautifully illustrated by her daughter, this collection of short stories by the incomparable Louise Erdrich centers on themes of life and death, the real and the surreal, the mundane and the extraordinary. Erdrich brings her signature elegance and gritty honesty to each." - Ms. Magazine

"Erdrich's new collection of stories written over 20 years testifies to the intrepidity of her explorations and her commitment to blurring boundaries and unsettling conventional oppositions in thrilling ways. . . . This is storytelling as wisdom magic: These are wonders to be cherished and pondered." - Boston Globe

"Here readers will find [Erdrich's] characteristic mix of sympathetic eccentrics, her knack for crafting compelling plots only polished and sharpened by the shorter form. And expect the occasional speculative leap, too -- see: "Domain," with its wry glimpse of the digital afterlife that wouldn't have felt out of place in an episode of Black Mirror." - NPR

"Erdrich composes stories that deliver rich experiences in a variety of settings. . . . Expect these pieces to delight, surprise and transport you." - Los Angeles Daily News