THOSE OF YOU who have faithfully subscribed to this newsletter know that our dwindling subscription list has made it necessary to reduce the length of our articles. So I must end here. But it appears, anyway, that since only the society’s treasurer, Neve Harp, and I, have convened to make any decisions at all regarding the preservation and upkeep of our little collection, and as only the two of us are left to contribute more material to this record, our membership is now closed. We declare our society defunct. We shall, however, keep walking the perimeter of Pluto until our footsteps wear our orbit into the earth. My last act as the president of Pluto’s historical society is this: I would like to declare a town holiday to commemorate the year I saved the life of my family’s murderer.
The wind will blow. The devils rise. All who celebrate shall be ghosts. And there will be nothing but eternal dancing, dust on dust, everywhere you look.
Oh my, too apocalyptic, I think as I leave my house to walk over to Neve’s to help her cope with her sleepless night. Dust on dust! There are very few towns where old women can go out at night and enjoy the breeze, so there is that about Pluto. I take my cane to feel the way, for the air is so black I think already we are invisible.
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THANK YOU: Terry Karten, this book’s editor; Trent Duffy, this book’s copy editor; Deborah Treisman; Jane Beirn; and Andrew Wylie. Thanks also to Sandeep Platel, M.D.
The author gratefully acknowledges the editors of the magazines and anthologies in which parts of this novel have appeared in different form: “The Plague of Doves,” The New Yorker and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006; “Sister Godzilla,” The Atlantic Monthly; “Shamengwa,” The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories 2003; “Town Fever,” North Dakota Quarterly; “Come In” (as “Gleason”), The New Yorker and The Best American Mystery Stories 2007; “Satan: Hijacker of a Planet,” The Atlantic Monthly and Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards; “The Reptile Garden” and “Demolition,” The New Yorker; and “Disaster Stamps of Pluto,” The New Yorker and The Best American Mystery Stories of 2005.
As in all of Louise Erdrich’s books, the reservation, towns, and people depicted are imagined places and characters, with these exceptions: Louis Riel, and also the name Holy Track. In 1897, at the age of thirteen, Paul Holy Track was hanged by a mob in Emmons County, North Dakota. The section “Town Fever” draws upon a Red River town-site speculation in 1857 by Daniel S. B. Johnston.
Any mistakes in the Ojibwe or Michif language are the author’s and do not reflect upon her patient teachers.
Part of the proceeds of this and all of Louise Erdrich’s books help fund Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore, and Birchbark Press, an Ojibwe-language publishing venture, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota (www.birchbarkbooks.com). This book is printed on recycled paper.
About the Author
LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of twelve novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.
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