Python's Kiss: Stories [J0455]

2026 HCDJ in nice clean condition. 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. Featuring wives and husbands, spirit animals, ghosts, and talismans, betrayals and secrets, an artificial afterlife and a dangerous teenage game, Erdrich's stories, at once intimate and universal, conjure up narrative worlds which capture our beauty and pain. Python's Kiss is a gift from one of our greatest chroniclers of human fallibility and nobility, an imaginative and perceptive storyteller whose generosity of vision, wit, and lyricism sing from every page.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Erdrich's stories are deeply human and real. Her writing is somehow both spare and lyrical."; "This short story collection had banger after banger, and now I'm convinced that Louise Erdrich is a literary shapeshifter, consistently reinventing her style to keep things fresh and unpredictable."; "These dynamic stories feature quirky characters with a slightly off-kilter, and downright dangerous feel to them."