Wednesday's Child

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.

Yiyun Li traces the quiet fractures in ordinary lives—those moments when grief or longing makes the world tilt just a little. A mother copes with loss by cataloguing every loved one who has disappeared from her life. A professor slips into an uneasy intimacy with her hairdresser. And once a year, a woman receives an email from an older stranger hundreds of miles away, a reminder of a connection she can’t quite sever.

Li’s stories live in those cracks beneath the everyday: a stolen jar of honey, a swarm of injured ants, a hidden photograph finally forced into the light. Each detail becomes a tiny fault line where death, estrangement, or violence presses through.

A master of emotional precision, Li writes with a blend of tenderness and stark honesty—funny, haunting, and profoundly wise. These stories, collected from a decade of work in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and more, illuminate the cost of simply being alive: the weight of exile, the ache of assimilation, the fragile persistence of love. It’s unsettling, beautiful, and unforgettable.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.