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

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

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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