Night Train

The most exciting addition to American Indian fiction since Sherman Alexie hit the scene.

What does it mean to be a “fully-processed” Indian in America today? In Night Train, Lise Erdrich offers a sharp-humored and powerful primer. Set in the small towns and reservations of northwestern Minnesota and western North Dakota, her literary snapshots capture lives playing out against backdrops of emergency rooms, supermarket aisles, backwoods parties, family breakfast tables, booze-soaked taverns, and sterile but emotionally fraught offices. As the pressures of daily life collide with the insidiousness of history, these stories reveal the personal struggles and small triumphs of people facing the absurdities of bureaucracy, cycles of poverty and addiction, and out-sized notions of Indian legends and culture.

Publication date: February 1, 2008

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5

Page count: 152 pages

ISBN: 9781566892025

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Lise Erdrich was born in Minnesota, grew up in North Dakota, and has worked in Indian health and education for over twenty years. Now a school health officer at Circle of Nations School in Wahpeton, North Dakota, Erdrich is a graduate of the University of North Dakota and of Minnesota State University-Mankato.

She is the author of the children’s picture books Sacagawea and Bears Make Rock Soup. Stories from Night Train, her first collection for adults, have received many awards including the Minnesota Monthly Tamarack Award, the Many Mountains Moving Flash Fiction Contest, and Best of Show at the North Dakota State Fair, where the story “Zanimoo” was exhibited between a pig and the pickles, jams, jellies and preserves. Erdrich’s essays and stories have also appeared in several journals and anthologies including Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community, and Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings After the Detours.

“Beautiful and rowdy, this book challenged, entertained, thrilled and scared me.”

—Sherman Alexie

“Night Train is abrasive, lucid, almost cruel but still very engaging. I admired the open mastery of language. It reminded me how wonderfully rejuvenating it can be to read prose of this quality.”

—Jim Harrison