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.
