Python's Kiss

Stories

By: Louise Erdrich

Narrated by: Pallas Erdrich

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.©2026 Louise Erdrich (P)2026 Little, Brown Book Group Limited

Critic reviews

'Written over the past two decades, these 13 tales are rooted in the tender portrayal of farmers, mothers, artists and teachers... [a] captivating collection'