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.
Yiyun Li is the author of five novels, two story collections, and one memoir. She has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, among other prizes.
Review: Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li review – dialogues with death, The Guardian
Read: The Particles of Order, The New Yorker
Prompt: Imagine your life as a museum exhibition. What objects would you include? What labels would need to be written? Describe the mood and atmosphere that also captures your life history to date. Hone in on specific days/key moments. Then zoom out to identify key themes and complications. Build a timeline if it’s helpful. Then with all of this begin with the lines ‘I visited the museum every Tuesday…’