Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the
Story Prize, the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for Fiction, and
the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award
Named a Best Book of the Year by
,
Vulture
Esquire
, NPR, and
Kirkus Reviews
A new collection—about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life—by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of
The Book of Goose.
A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of
Wednesday’s Child
, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. Even before such moments, everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.
Yiyun Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and her memoir, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in
The New Yorker
Zoetrope
, and other publications. Taken together, these stories, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living—exile, assimilation, loss, love—with Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.