Wednesday's Child
Stories
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The protagonists of Li's splendid and elegantly observed collection (after the novel The Book of Goose) desire to lead purposeful lives. "A Sheltered Woman" centers on Chinese immigrant and postpartum nanny Auntie Mei, who lives with her clients for the first month after childbirth. After her current client Chanel claims to have postpartum depression, she briefly imagines running away with the baby, but knows she'll soon move onto the next family. In "Hello, Goodbye," friends Katie and Nina remain in California after graduating from UC Berkeley in the 1990s to avoid returning to their respective homes in the Midwest. Years later, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Katie considers divorcing her older boorish husband and moves in with Nina's Chinese American family in Kansas. "On the Street Where You Live" follows a woman named Becky who processes her conflicted feelings about motherhood, imagines having an affair with someone she meets at a diner, and recognizes the rift between her "commonplace" mind and that of her six-year-old son, who is autistic. Distinguished by their fully realized characters, nuanced narration, and striking portraits of everyday struggles, these stories find Li at the top of her game.
