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 oppor tunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America's most important writers.