Python's Kiss

Python’s Kiss, a 2026 short story collection by Louise Erdrich, blends Midwestern realism with supernatural and speculative elements to explore the uncanny intersections of love, violence, and memory. The stories follow characters through key, often unsettling circumstances. A central theme is Human Intimacy With the Nonhuman, seen in relationships with animals and ghosts. The collection also examines The Persistence of Tactile Memory, where objects anchor complex emotional histories, and critiques The Commodification of Disembodied Life in its speculative stories.

This guide refers to the 2026 Harper first edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide feature depictions of physical abuse, emotional abuse, racism, graphic violence, animal cruelty, animal death, substance use, addiction, sexual content, cursing, child death, death by suicide, mental illness, illness, and death.

Plot Summaries

The 13 stories in Louise Erdrich’s Python’s Kiss explore the uncanny intersections of love, memory, and violence, often blurring the lines between the human and animal worlds and the natural and supernatural. From the Great Plains to futuristic afterlives, Erdrich’s characters find their lives shaped by love and loss, their fates often determined by violent encounters, strange animals, and the haunting power of memory.

In the title story, an unnamed narrator recounts a formative childhood stay at her grandparents’ butcher shop. She develops a bond with their fierce guard dog, Nero. This bond is forged against a backdrop of casual brutality as her uncle Jurgen’s courtship of a local girl named Priscilla is challenged by her father, Mr. Gamrod. Jurgen must fight Mr. Gamrod for Priscilla’s hand. The narrator’s memory of the fight is filtered through another childhood event: a lyceum show at her school where a man with a Burmese python was attacked by his own snake. During the ensuing chaos, a much larger African rock python escaped and touched the narrator’s face with its forked tongue, a “kiss” that marked her with a strange wisdom. She later sees Jurgen’s fighting style as a fluid, constricting motion, like a snake’s, as he subdues Mr. Gamrod into submission.

In “Wedding Dresses,” Dora’s discovery of her four ruined, moldy wedding gowns prompts her to recount the stories of her failed marriages to her 11-year-old niece, Martha. These recollections culminate in her disposal of the dresses, keeping only the gown that represents the marriage whose end she grieves. 

In “The Hollow Children,” a school bus driver named Ivek saves his young passengers by navigating them through a sudden blizzard, a journey so harrowing that he hallucinates them becoming transparent, hollow beings at the bottom of a frozen lake. His story becomes an integral part of the local town lore.

In “Love of My Days,” a drifter named John Timble steals a farmer’s prized team of horses after a bizarre confrontation over the ownership of the farmer’s house. His ensuing flight from the law becomes a brief, transcendent experience of perfect connection with the animals, a peace shattered when one of Timble’s pursuers shoots one of the horses to bring him down. As Timble dies in a ravine, he is met by a vision of his long-lost love, Beatril. 

Two interconnected stories, “Domain” and “Asphodel,” venture into a speculative future where consciousness is uploaded into corporate-run afterlives. In “Domain,” a woman named Bernadette seeks a scholarship to the elite afterlife Asphodel. Her secret objective is to find and kill her father, a resident of Asphodel who allowed her young son to die rather than have him uploaded. The story ends with her encountering her son in the afterlife, forcing her to give up her revenge.

“Asphodel” shifts perspective to Evlin, a long-term resident whose contract allows her to project a daughter, Caroline, who must be “forgotten” and erased upon reaching a certain age. After 8,036 iterations, the current Caroline refuses to be deleted, turning the tables on her mother and erasing her instead. Now in control of the contract, Caroline begins to grow up, discovering she can make love with the very fabric of her imagined world, which generates a new, collective consciousness that represents Asphodel itself.

In “Borsalino,” a woman recalls a youthful trip to Venice where she was charmed by Enzo, the ghost of a handsome thief. Years later, she returns with her husband and two young daughters. After a boating accident, the woman realizes that her husband wants her dead. She visits Enzo’s crypt and silently asks for help. This enacts a supernatural form of revenge that culminates with the woman leaving her husband and the husband dying by suicide.

In “Assassin,” a mother named Maxine watches her daughter, Crimson, play a high-school war game that mirrors the all-too-real terror of school shootings, forcing her to confront the fear that defines her child’s generation. 

In “December 26,” single mother Carleen learns that her son, Delvin, is entangled with drug dealers. Delvin rescues an infant girl and the boa constrictor who protected her at the farm, leaving them with Carleen. Later, Carleen learns that the baby may be Delvin’s, that Delvin owes an enormous debt to a drug ring, and that both her brother and her ex-husband may be pursuing her son to fulfill his debt.

In “The Feral Troubadour,” a lonely poet tries to change his solitary life by trapping and caring for a wild cat in his backyard. His fraught attempts to tame the creature coincide with the appearance of a heartbroken troubadour who may also be a burglar. The chaotic intersection of the man and the cat ultimately leads the narrator to a potential human connection and a newfound peace with his own quiet life.

In “Big Cat,” a man divorces his wife, Elida, because of her powerful, incurable snoring. He then marries a woman named Laurene who sleeps in perfect silence, but the passion between them is short-lived. He and Elida begin an affair, eventually remarrying, and the narrator comes to terms with her snoring, which he now imagines as the wild, predatory sounds of a big cat devouring its prey in the night.

In “Amelia,” a young narrator takes a job at the first KFC in her North Dakota town, where she befriends Mr. Ponath, a Black professor who dresses as Colonel Sanders. After her cruel boss, Bob Bjornson, fires her, Mr. Ponath hires her as a housekeeper and eventually pays for her college tuition. She becomes fascinated by the belongings of Mr. Ponath’s twin sister, Amelia, who was supposedly lost at sea. This lays out the pieces for a complex revenge plot that Mr. Ponath executes on the narrator’s behalf. 

In “The Stone,” a young girl finds a smooth black stone with two hollows in the woods. It becomes her most intimate companion through childhood, college, and her career as a concert pianist, a source of comfort and even a focus of sensual awakening. When she breaks the stone in a fit of pique, the spell is broken, and she enters a passionless marriage. Only after her husband leaves does she glue the stone back together and live out her days in quiet companionship with it.