Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li

Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li

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 Los Angeles Times, 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.

Shall I Go, Where Causes End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl are among Yiyun Li's works of fiction, as well as the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has won numerous accolades, including the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and the Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker's fiction issue 20 Under 40. The New Yorker, A Public Place, The Best American Short Stories, and The O have all published her work. Among other publications, Henry Prize Tales. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and lectures at Princeton University.