Content report card
Wednesday's Child parent’s guide: what’s inside
LGBTQ+ themes
Substance use
What it offers
Educational value
A note for parents
This is a sophisticated literary short story collection by an acclaimed author, written for adult readers and centered on mature themes of loss, grief, alienation, and existential uncertainty. While not graphically violent or sexually explicit, the stories explore psychological and emotional darkness—death, estrangement, and the fragility of human connection—in ways that require emotional maturity to process. The prose is reflective and often unsettling rather than plot-driven, making it most suitable for older teens and adults.
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From the publisher
Finalist for the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction Long-listed for 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 contemporar... Finalist for the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction Long-listed for 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.
Shelved under
- Fiction
- Diverse Characters
- Character driven
- Strong Character Development
- reflective
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ISBN 9780374606381 · Farrar, Straus and Giroux