Wednesday's Child

Stories

De: Yiyun Li

Narrado por: Yiyun Li

This program is read by the author and includes an audio-only bonus story, Call Me Ishmael's Mother.

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2023 Yiyun Li (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

2023, Barnes and Noble Best Books of the Year: Long-listed

2023, New Yorker Best Books of the Year: Long-listed

2023, Los Angeles Times Best Books of the Year: Long-listed

2023, Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year: Long-listed

2023, NPR Best Book of the Year: Long-listed

2023, Library Journal Best Books of the Year: Long-listed

2024, Pulitzer Prize - Finalist: Short-listed

2024, Mark Twain American Voice in Literature: Short-listed

2023, L.A. Times Book Prize - Finalist: Short-listed

2023, Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year: Long-listed

“Splendid and elegantly observed . . . Distinguished by their fully realized characters, nuanced narration, and striking portraits of everyday struggles, these stories find Li at the top of her game.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred)

“An infinite variety of ways to survive—or, at least, march through—devastating loss are cataloged in Li’s cool and measured litany of pain . . . The cumulative mass of the stories is sobering, a gorgeous almanac . . . Quiet, beautiful accounts of journeys through hell.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Meh

It fulfilled the prompt of reading something by Macmillan Publishers. I might have preferred her "Dear Friend" memoir over this collection of short stories.

Poignant.

I do not care much for collections of short stories but I really liked this one.

Interesting

Revitalizing stories. You will find yourself thinking about the story well after you have read it. I wish the author would allow someone else in read her work. It’s a bit of struggle trying to understand her. Her accent is at times overwhelming.