Wednesday's Child
Published on 14. September 2023
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-00-853186-7 (ISBN)
Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024
'Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration' SIGRID NUNEZ
'One of our finest living authors'
NEW YORK TIMES
'Bruising, beautiful'
GUARDIAN
A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, ageing 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.
'Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching ... Li explores the brittle fractures within the human heart ... A shimmering meditation'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'Strands of melancholy are braided through Li's tender, thoughtful stories'
DAILY MAIL
'Against the backdrop of threat, Li's characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality'
OBSERVER
'Any book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration' SIGRID NUNEZ
'One of our finest living authors'
NEW YORK TIMES
'Bruising, beautiful'
GUARDIAN
A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, ageing 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.
'Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching ... Li explores the brittle fractures within the human heart ... A shimmering meditation'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'Strands of melancholy are braided through Li's tender, thoughtful stories'
DAILY MAIL
'Against the backdrop of threat, Li's characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality'
OBSERVER
Reviews / Votes
'Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching ... A shimmering meditation' Financial Times'Affecting' The Pulitzer Prize
'Tender, thoughtful' Daily Mail
'Grief, survival, aftermath ... Many of the pieces center on the painful unspooling of memories as life continues' Observer
'Stories of mourning and intimacy ... full of wonder' Times Literary Supplement
'One of our finest practitioners of the short story form ... Packed with extraordinary beauty and quiet devastation, these stories cut quick and deep, like a knife in the dark' Esquire
'A skilled impressionist' The New York Times Book Review
'Strange and distinctive' The Wall Street Journal
'A collection to savour, contemplate and return to' Culture Whisper
'A gorgeous almanac of the world of pain' Kirkus
'Absorb the brilliance of Li's prose ... honour the breathtaking heartbreak trapped within' Booklist
'Splendid and elegantly observed ... These stories find Li at the top of her game' Publishers Weekly
'[Li] has the gift of making every story feel like a discovery, freshly unearthed' Louis Bayard, 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story Citation
'One of the foremost fiction writers in America ... Li's dense fiction weaves together history, memory, and experience ... challenging and delighting at every turn' World Literature Today
'Timeless ... [Li's] once again shown us why she's remained such a treasured guide to the lands of grief over the past twenty-plus years' Chicago Review of Books
'Few writers tackle the way grief reverberates through our lives with Li's frankness, tact, and humour' Vulture
'A beautiful meditation on life and all its nuances' Shondaland
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
HarperCollins Publishers
Dimensions
Height: 218 mm
Width: 141 mm
Thickness: 28 mm
Weight
368 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-00-853186-7 (9780008531867)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Yiyun Li is the author of eight books of fiction and two books of nonfiction, including Where Reasons End, and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her accolades include the Guardian First Book Award, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, a Windham-Campbell prize, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Jean Stein Award and the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She teaches at Princeton University, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.