Finalist for the Story Prize and the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
Named a Best Book of 2023 by Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Esquire, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews
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.
Author: Yiyun Li
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 09/05/2023
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.78lbs
Size: 8.57h x 5.75w x 0.98d
ISBN: 9780374606374
Language: English
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