Wednesday's Child Stories by Yiyun Li

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 Yiyun Li's stories, 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.
And even everyday life is laden withmeaning, 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.
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 memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have
appeared in The New Yorke r, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. Taken together, the
stories in Wednesday's Child, written over the span of a decade, articulate the
cost, both material and emotional, of living - exile, assimilation, loss, love -
with her trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.

Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction - Must I Go, Where Reasons
End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The
Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl - and the memoir Dear Friend, from My
Life I Write to You in Your Life . She is the recipient of many awards, including
the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein
Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her
work has also appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, T he Best
American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other
publications. She teaches at Princeton University.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
On Sale: Sep 5/23
5.38 x 8.25 • 256 pages
9780374606374 • $36.00 • CL - With dust jacket
Fiction / Short Stories (Single Author)