Python’s Kiss
On sale
11th March 2027
Price: £10.99
‘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.
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.
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'
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.