The Center for Fiction Presents Louise Erdrich on Python's Kiss with Lauren Groff (Virtual Event)

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Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT April 14, 2026

Virtual Only

Join us for a virtual discussion with beloved Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich on her new short-story collection, Python’s Kiss.

In Python’s Kiss, one of America’s most significant authors explores the connections between humans, animals, and the environment in her first short fiction anthology since 2009. Written over the last two decades, Python’s Kiss features an incredible breadth of characters, including small-town journalists, immigrant farmers, folk-singing thieves, and fraught families—all primarily centered around the fictional small town of Tabor. Suffused with magical realism and a blurring of the line between ordinary and mythological, the book is also a multimedia exercise in connection, with illustrations by Erdrich’s daughter, Aza E. Abe, interwoven throughout.

Erdrich will be joined in conversation by celebrated author Lauren Groff (Brawler, Fates and Furies). In addition to being fellow indie bookstore owners, Erdrich and Groff are longtime admirers of each other’s work. Aza E. Abe will also join midway through the event to share how she approached creating visual art for the stories.

This event is co-presented with Groff’s bookstore, The Lynx.

Featuring

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the award-winning author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Photo Credit: Pallas Erdrich
Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff is the author of eight books, including three National Book Award finalists: Fates and Furies, Florida, and Matrix, and, most recently, the short-story collection Brawler. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where, with her husband, she owns The Lynx, an independent bookstore.

Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Aza E. Abe

Aza E. Abe

Aza Erdrich Abe lives and creates art near the woods in Minneapolis with her family. Her work is rooted in Anishinaabe aesthetics and sensibilities passed down from her mother and grandmother, storytelling, and her own lived experiences. You can find her on a walk, in the studio drawing and listening to audiobooks, or at http://www.azaeabe.com/.

Featured Book

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Python's Kiss

By Louise Erdrich

Published by HarperCollins

PURCHASE

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 opportunity to celebrate the wisdom and brilliant, wide-ranging imagination of one of America’s most important writers.