Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2023
On Sale: September 5, 2023
Featuring: Yiyun Li
256 pages ISBN: 0374606374 EAN: 9780374606374 Kindle: B0BQGGQG4N Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
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.
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