SHORT FICTION: THE PYTHON’S KISS Stories by Louise Erdrich (Corsair Books, 2026)
In Louise Erdrich's short story ‘The Stone,’ published in The New Yorker on September 9th, 2019, and now included in her collection The Python’s Kiss, a girl becomes attached to a stone she finds while on holiday. The story follows the trajectory of the girl's entire life, never separated for long from the mysterious object, a piece of basalt. ‘It was black and rounded, nestled in the crotch of the birch clump. Water had scoured out two symmetrical hollows, giving it an owlish look, or a blind look, or, anyway, some quality that was oddly attractive.’ Erdrich points the reader to the history of the stone which stretches back over a billion years, and the single lifetime which then plays out against a geological one. The stone becomes the mirror for an entire life.
‘It was black and rounded, nestled in the crotch of the birch clump. Water had scoured out two symmetrical hollows, giving it an owlish look, or a blind look, or, anyway, some quality that was oddly attractive.’
When I first came across this story in The New Yorker, I fell in love with the way Erdrich handles scale and time through the simple use of an inanimate object. In the span of a few pages, she draws out the arc of a life; from girl to young woman, to middle age, and finally to old age and death. The story holds multiple layers. It is at once an intimate character study and a meditation on the human need to attach meaning to the non-human world, as well as what it means to hold onto something for an entire lifetime and, eventually, to let it go. It also draws us to think about human attachments and relationships and how everything is transient. The ending is beautiful and left deliberately open to interpretation, as any brilliant short story sets out to achieve.
Erdrich is known for both her short fiction and her highly acclaimed novels, among them Love Medicine and The Night Watchman. Both of which I have read and admired. Her style, in both forms intertwines an Ojibwe worldview with that of the wider world. I was delighted by her most recent short story collection, Python's Kiss, published earlier this year. The collection draws together stories written and published, many of them in The New Yorker, over the past two decades. The title story ‘The Pythons Kiss’ originally published as ‘Nero’ in The New Yorker in April 2012, is narrated by a woman looking back at when she was a girl and sent to live with her grandparents. The story focuses on the grandfather’s fearsome guard dog Nero and her own encounter with a python which leaves a lifelong ambiguity for her. ‘Domain’ imagines an afterlife run like a corporate business, unsettling and darkly funny in equal measure, while ‘Wedding Dresses’ moves back through a woman's past marriages to trace what led to their unravelling. Stories like ‘The Stone’ included in the collection, work differently again, using Ojibwe custom and belief to weave the unknown into the everyday rather than invent a world apart from it.
Python’s Kiss is a body of work that ranges widely in tone and character. What unites the collection is Erdrich’s unique sensibility, her tapestry of mythic and mysterious and real, and the beauty and exactitude of Erdrich's mature prose.
Each story is accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by her daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe, and the thirteen line illustrations woven through the book. It's a quiet, intimate collaboration, and a lovely note to find running underneath a collection so preoccupied with what gets passed across generations.
THE PYTHON’S KISS Stories By Louise Erdrich (Corsair Books, 2026)