Python’s Kiss: Stories

Pulitzer winner Erdrich (The Night Watchman) dives deep into the American psyche in this spectacular collection. The title story chronicles a young girl’s kinship with a lovesick dog and mysterious anointing by a snake (“I looked straight into its wise, primordial face. Its tongue flickered, sensing the currents of pandemonium, and then the forked tip touched my cheek”). In the standout “The Hollow Children,” a group of barflies in northern Minnesota reminisce about a deadly 1923 blizzard. The frame narrative seamlessly dissolves into school bus driver Ivek’s ambiguous account of the storm, in which he describes how he was forever changed by his harrowing drive with a bus full of children, which may or may not have sunk to the bottom of a lake. Two strange speculative stories concern a human-engineered afterlife in a place called Asphodel (“You say goodbye to your body very carefully. The toenails you’ve clipped and polished.... and goodbye tongue, that loved the kisses and also the body of my husband”). In the surreal “Big Cat,” a failed actor marries a woman who comes from a line of loud snorers. After they amicably divorce, they worry about the well-being of their teen daughter, who develops her own problem with snoring. A staggering sense of empathy infuses the stories (“Can it be that all of us upon waking sometimes feel malformed or broken, foolish, as we huddle in our nests all over the earth?”). With its range of voices and styles, this puts Erdrich’s powers on full display. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Mar.)