Excerpt from The Last Report On The Miracles At Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

By the way she said it, he knew she was a Swabian and therefore he tried to thrust the thought from his mind--possessing certain unruly habits in bed. She continued to speak, her voice husky and bossy. He passed his hand across his eyes. Through the gown of nearly transparent muslin he could see that her breasts were, excitingly, bound tight to her chest with strips of cloth. He blinked hard. Looking directly into her eyes, he experienced the vertigo of confronting a female who did not blush or look away but held him with an honest human calm. He thought at first she must be a loose woman, fleeing a brothel -- had Fargo got so big? Or escaping an evil marriage, perhaps. He didn't know she was from God.


Sister Cecilia

In the center of the town on the other side of the river there stood a convent made of yellow bricks. Hauled halfway across Minnesota from Little Falls brickworks by pious drivers, they still held the peculiar sulfurous moth gold of the clay outside that town. The word Fleisch was etched in shallow letters on each one. Fleisch Company Brickworks. Donated to the nuns at cost. The word, of course, was covered by mortar each time a brick was laid. Because she had organized a few discarded bricks behind the convent into the base for a small birdbath, the youngest nun knew, as she gazed at the mute order of the convent's wall, that she lived within the secret repetition of that one word...

Copyright Louise Erdrich 2001. Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Harper Collins. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.