Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Story Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award
Named a Best Book of the Year by Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Esquire, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews
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 the stories of Wednesday's Child, 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. Even before such moments, 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.
Yiyun 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 her memoir, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and other publications. Taken together, these stories, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living—exile, assimilation, loss, love—with Li's trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.
- Black History and Black Future
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Canada Reads 2025
- Celebrating #LMM150
- Lest We Forget
- New eBook additions
- Witch, Please
- Hamilton Reads 2024: Chrysalis
- True North Strong and Well-Read
- Summer Reading List: Recent Canadian books to read this summer
- Hamilton Reads 2024: Pride Month
- Looks Sweet but Could Be Spicy
- Based on a True Story: Page to Screen Edition
- See all
- Canada Reads 2025
- True Crime: For When You Run Out of Podcasts
- Available now
- Lest We Forget
- Summer Reading List: Recent Canadian books to read this summer
- New audiobook additions
- Looks Sweet but Could Be Spicy
- Most popular
- Hamilton Reads 2024: Chrysalis
- Indigenous History and Voices
- Based on a True Story: Page to Screen Edition
- Entering Our Eclipse Era
- BookTok Made Us Do It
- See all