Author(s): Yiyun Li

Staff Picks- Read our reviews | Short Stories

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.

A beautiful and thought-provoking collection of stories. If you haven’t already read some of Yiyun Li’s other work, I highly recommend. She is a wonderful and moving author who focuses on some of the more mundane aspects of life but writes them in such a way that makes you appreciate beauty in the small things or even recognize the darkness and sorrow that is intertwined in them. Most of the stories in Wednesday’s Child seem to follow themes of grief and/or motherhood, and with her writing Li really just forces you to ponder certain things regarding those themes. My favorite of the short stories would have to be the first one Wednesday’s child. It has a poetic sorrow to it which makes it feel raw and beautiful. Despite having a favorite, I did enjoy all the stories included in the collection and would definitely recommend a read.

-maggie