Name: Wednesday’s Child
Rating: 4.125 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9780008531881

Yiyun Li

‘Any new book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration’ Sigrid Nunez ‘One of our finest living authors’ New York Times

Wednesday’s Child

baku

When wolves tear a sheep apart with their fangs, when a hawk carries a lamb away in its claws, what's the point of shedding tears? One less in the flock, yet life wouldn't therefore soften itself for those who remain.

lt takes only a little more than nothing for desires to encroach upon one's life.

Would canceled trains only lead to more canceled trains, or would this strandedness, like ceaseless rain during a rainy season or a seemingly unfinishable novel, suddenly come to an end, on a Sunday afternoon in late May or on a snowy morning in January?

There are two types of mothers: those who have not taught their children to be kind to themselves, and those who have not learned to be kind to their children.

The saving grace, Rosalie thought, is that not all pains and not all worries are permanent. Some, time-sensitive, can be desensitized by time. How else could a parent, or anyone, go on living courageously? 

I am sure that if you had been told when you were a child about all the things that you were going to have to do, you would have thought you had better die at once, you would not have believed you could ever have the strength to do them.

An enemy could be as eternally close as a friend; a feud could make two men brothers for life. Fortunate are those for whom everyone can be turned into a stranger,

If knowing someone makes that person stay with you forever, not knowing someone does the same trick: death does not take the dead away; it only makes them grow more deeply into you

She had, unlike her mother and her grandmother, talked herself into being a woman with an ordinary fate. When she moved on to the next place, she would leave no mystery or damage behind; no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her.

Things will go right for us if we're lucky, things will go wrong if we're not lucky, there is nothing you parents can do.

How strange, Nina thought, that after a young life ends people think and talk about the death more than the life. It is easier that way: tragedies and catastrophes always have an ending.

Those who allow themselves to be hurt in the name of love must understand better than anyone the desire to hurt.

“Is there a neutral position in a revolution?”

"A neutral position? That would still be a counterrevolutionary position. If youre not for something, you must be against something, right?"

“…don't die when I'm out there in California.”

“I can't really promise that," Dr. Ditmus said with a smile.

“I know, but now I've said it aloud, were going to be okay,”

When the dead departed. They took away any falsehoods that they might have allowed m to believe while alive; we who are left behind have to embark on a different life, since the dead are no longer here to help us deceive ourselves. 

why would she want to be saved when her friends and their memories would become the casualties of her battle to live on?

 doesn't put rice in the cooker or a roof over our heads." "What does love do?" I asked. 

“Oh, love makes a good movie," she said. "Without movies, what would we do with ourselves?"

Does he deserve your love, or does he deserve to be killed by you? she asked herself, her face frozen with indecision. Do you have a choice?

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 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. 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 Yorker, 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.

Stories

Wednesday's Child

The melancholia and depth to each story in this book is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in a book of short stories. I’ve always struggled with short stories because there is never enough time to grow attached to the characters, but Yiyun Li paints such clear portraits of how compelling human nature can be that it’s so easy to participate in the worlds she creates for however short or long. I think she may be my new favorite author!! These stories are unusual, melancholy typically, and not for the faint of heart. I ended each with a whistful sigh. 

Lily Dendy

While I was not entirely convinced by the opening story, I quickly got into the rhythm of the collection and into Li's writing style. There are such interesting meditations on parenthood and the state of being someone's child, on interpersonal familial relationships within the short stories. All are presented in an extremely digestable, extremely readable form; creative and refreshing while also feeling grounded in reality and believable. It is the kind of collection with which it is worth to sit for a bit.

Favourite entries: "A Small Flame", "On the Street Where You Live", "Such Common Life", "Alone", "When We Were Happy We Had Other Names"

While I was not entirely convinced by the opening story, I quickly got into the rhythm of the collection and into Li's writing style. There are such interesting meditations on parenthood and the state of being someone's child, on interpersonal familial relationships within the short stories. All are presented in an extremely digestable, extremely readable form; creative and refreshing while also feeling grounded in reality and believable. It is the kind of collection with which it is worth to sit for a bit.

Favourite entries: "A Small Flame", "On the Street Where You Live", "Such Common Life", "Alone", "When We Were Happy We Had Other Names"

'One of our major novelists' Salman Rushdie 'One of our finest living authors' New York Times A dazzling new collection of short stories, spanning 15 years of writing, from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, aging and the strangeness of contemporary life - from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. 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 grand mysterious forces - death, violence, estrangement - come to light. And even 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. Li is a breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child articulate the true cost of living with all Li's trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom.

Wednesday’s Child

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