Python's Kiss by Louise Erdrich

Written over the past two decades, Louise Erdrich's magnificent story collection features a range of characters - 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, this is an intimate and revelatory creative collaboration between mother and daughter.