'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.