From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich, a captivating collection of short stories

It was as though I was chosenmarked out by the pythons 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 Erdrichs magnificent story collection features a range of charactersa 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 Abean intimate and revelatory creative collaboration between mother and daughterthese stories offer an opportunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of Americas most important writers.