Short stories by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich is the author of seventeen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.
Listing 13 stories.
After a horrific accident, Bernadette agrees to upload her consciousness to a memory server and discard her physical form. She's determined to murder her father's mind, also housed in the same server.
In 1920, a girl who works with her stepfather for the town butcher recounts when a woman from a nearby Native American reservation came to work at the shop. While the woman never did anything herself, the girl believes she is the cause of a series of troubling events.
A young girl living with her grandparents is spectator to the conflicts between the members of their restaurant family—including their vicious guard dog, to who she forms an attachment.
A woman who lives peacefully in the country spends most of her time with an artist who lives nearby, invested in his life and work. When the artist faces troubles due to a clumsy and destructive teenage boy, the woman must confront her feelings for the man.
Fourteen-year-old Native American girl, who is white-passing and passionate about becoming devout, joins a convent and is thought to attract the devil.
A sixteen-year-old girl in the American West experiences her sexual awakening under the veil of religion.
A woman becomes invested in the odd and exciting life of her coworker, a pregnant construction worker whose boyfriend has been in and out of state prison for over a decade. The boyfriend, a Native American living in North Dakota, escapes so often that the town's officers, at this point, usually just sigh and get drinks when they see him run. When it is time for the birth of his child, the boyfriend escapes from prison to meet his son, but the day does not go as planned.
On a present-day Native American reservation, a tribal judge investigates the robbery of an elderly man’s stolen fiddle. In the process, they uncover the fiddle's mythical origin story.
Margaret and Grandfather Nanapush, two Chippewa elders, are captured and shamed by younger reservation inhabitants for their refusal to sign a controversial treaty. Nanapush and Margaret’s stepdaughter Fleur enact revenge through snares and old magic, respectively.
A two-bit actor who married into a family of female snorers wades through a messy divorce, remarries, and endures another, messier, divorce from his second ex-wife. He finally lands back with his original family—a wife who he knows doesn’t love him and a daughter who has also begun to snore.