Wednesday's Child: Stories [Paperback]

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, theStory Prize, theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize for Fiction, andthe Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award
Named a Best Book of the Year byLos Angeles Times,Vulture,Esquire, NPR, andKirkus Reviews

A new collectionabout loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary lifeby the award-winning, and inimitable, author ofThe Book of Goose.

A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone shes 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 ofWednesdays Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forcesdeath, violence, estrangementcome 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 inThe 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 livingexile, assimilation, loss, lovewith Lis trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.