Wednesdays Child

(Hardback)

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Any new book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration Sigrid Nunez

One of our finest living authors New York Times
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 shes 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 Lis 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 Lis trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom.

Reviews

Praise for Yiyun Li

Any new book by Yiyun Li is cause for celebration, but now more than ever do we need the clarity and humaneness of her vision Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend

Li is extraordinary a storyteller of the first order. She inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and compassion that one cannot help but marvel Junot Daz, author of This is How You Lose Her

Few writers match Yiyun Lis ability to explore human desire and ambition One of the great writers of our time Tash Aw, author of We, the Survivors

'Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as its happening. She is one of my favourite writers' Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion

Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision Guardian

Lis books render the world so sharply that they might draw blood Los Angeles Times

Li narrates from the fringes of her own experience She insists on her own uncategorizable perspective, breaking rules in a sly, stubborn way Alexandra Kleeman, New York Times

Author Bio

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China, and came to the United States in 1996. She is the recipient of several prizes for her writing and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Lis stories have been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, USA, with her husband and their two sons.