In its opening stories, her new collection, Python’s Kiss, treads the precarious path between those two pillars of achievement in fiction quite ably. Minneapolis is the Big City, welcoming characters from the Dakotas and elsewhere, and sometimes ejecting them back to their rural lives. It turns out that Erdrich writes noir with a flourish, and of all the stories in Python’s Kiss, “December 26” feels the most like one that was cut short, that could have easily become a novel. The book is elegantly designed, with each story prefaced by a drawing by Erdrich’s daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe. Erdrich is primarily a novelist: Python’s Kiss is only her second collection of stories.