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Stories
by Louise Erdrich
Book Reviewed by: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.
Python's Kiss
He was the second, or perhaps the third, Nero owned by my grandparents. With a grocery store that included a butcher shop and a slaughterhouse, they could feed as many dogs as they liked. Nero, a mixture of fierce breeds in a line known locally as guard dogs, was valued for his great strength, his formidable jaws, and his resonant bark. At night, he was turned loose to guard the cash register in the front of the shop, where he paced the waxed linoleum, a ghostly white. Other unbanked valuables were kept in a safe, but that was in my grandfather's bedroom. He slept behind a locked door with my grandmother on one side and a loaded gun on the other. This was not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water.
I was taken to stay with my grandparents because my mother was about to have a baby. The plan was for me to stay there until the baby was established at home—a period of only two or three weeks. While there, I must have lived at a more intense ...
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (5/14/2026)
I finished Python's Kiss , by Louise Erdrich. I'm not a fan of short stories, but when Louise Erdrich publishes something new, I read it. I liked most of the stories in this collection but some were too dark for my taste. Then I am starting Mad Mabel .
-Holly_Batsell
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (4/02/2026)
I'm still listening to The Finest Hotel in Kabul. I am really enjoying this framing of history. I read Python's Kiss by Louise Erdrich. I struggle to appreciate short stories. These had elements of folklore, magic, and mysticism that sort of escaped my understanding. I also read The...
-Anne_Glasgow
Erdrich's characters are flawed, courageous and ashamed, lonely and terrified, and always longing for something: not only freedom, but companionship at all costs, for a way to forget the what ifs that still haunt and the grief that comes with them, reminding us that regret is just longing for what might have been. Yet, Erdrich never lets cynicism take root. There is always another way of seeing, another angle of grace presented. Python's Kiss is for anyone who has wished they were someone else or bonded with an animal, whether human or not. With her signature clarity and emotional precision, Erdrich gets straight to the heart of universal truths we all feel but sometimes cannot articulate. She simply sees as many sides as possible and invites us to do the same...continued
Full Review
(510 words)
(Reviewed by Christine Runyon).
The Ojibwe are the most populous Indigenous tribe in North America today, encompassing several smaller bands, including the Turtle Mountain Band of of Chippewa, of which Louise Erdrich is a member. The Ojibwe people's connections to each other and to the environment are core details in the stories in her collection Python's Kiss.
In Ojibwe tradition, as in many other Indigenous cultures, the natural world is an interwoven part of everyday life.
But in typical Western thinking, there is a disconnect and irregularity in how humans see each other in opposition to the natural world. As Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes:
"In the English language, a human alone has distinction while all other living beings are lumped ...
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It is always darkest just before the day dawneth
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