Python's Kiss
Stories
Published on 24. March 2026
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-4721-6081-2 (ISBN)
Description
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 oppor-tunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America's most important writers.
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 oppor-tunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America's most important writers.
Reviews / Votes
'Written over the past two decades, these 13 tales are rooted in the tender portrayal of farmers, mothers, artists and teachers... [a] captivating collection' * Daily Mail * Louise Erdrich has been described as one of the greatest American writers, and this collection lives up to that billing . . . These are hopeful and sad and wistful lives, lives of people trying their best. Every story is intriguing, most are funny, many poignant . . . [They] remind me of Raymond Carver and of Annie Proulx . . . Maybe what makes Erdrich's writing so vital is that in such places of seasons and wide nights and animals, the fact of death is more present, and thus more visible to the writer's eye. -- Lucy Sweeney Byrne * irish Times *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Little, Brown Book Group
Product notice
Trade binding
Dimensions
Height: 220 mm
Width: 139 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
366 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4721-6081-2 (9781472160812)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
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.