This unique volume brings together, for the first time, three decades of stories by one of the most innovative and exciting writers of our day. Louise Erdrich has selected these pieces--thirty stories which first appeared in magazines as well as six unpublished stories--from among a much larger oeuvre, and she has ordered them more or less chronologically but also by theme and voice. Erdrich is a fearless and inventive writer. In her fictional world, the mystical can emerge from the everyday, the comic turn suddenly tragic, and violence and beauty inhabit a single emotional landscape. Each character in these stories is full of surprises, and the twists and leaps of Erdrich’s imagination are made all the more meaningful by the deeper truth of human feeling that underlies them. In “Saint Marie,” the ardent longing that propels a fourteen-year old Indian girl up the hill to the Sacred Heart Convent and into a life-and-death struggle with the diabolical Sister Leopolda fuels a story of