★ 2023-06-08
“Air oxidizes, water rusts. Time, like air and water, erodes.” Li expands on this premise in a collection of 11 short stories.
Revisiting the territories of grief and loss she’s explored in earlier works, Li places her protagonists in situations of reflection upon the circumstances of their bereaved lives. Mothers contemplate the deaths of children, wives recall long-estranged husbands, and women are haunted by missing friends. 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. In “When We Were Happy We Had Other Names,” the mother of a teen who has ended his own life opens a spreadsheet of all those she knows who have died in a literal calculation of grief. (The same mother muses upon whether life is just the antechamber for death.) The dead and missing in Li’s stories are not without voice: A woman who is the lone long-term survivor of a teenage suicide pact in which several of her friends died—detailed in “Alone”—realizes the other girls have made themselves more present in her later life through their absence. The bereaved often carry the weight of either casual or calculated misogyny along with their life burdens, and echoes of #MeToo claims underlie other injuries. The relative values of memory and forgetting are examined, too, as one woman does not “indulge” in focusing on the past (in “Hello, Goodbye”) and another muses that memory is actually nonlinear and more of a jumbled haystack of incomplete stories which can only attempt to distract from an absence (“When We Were Happy We Had Other Names”). The cumulative mass of the stories is sobering, a gorgeous almanac of the world of pain.
Quiet, beautiful accounts of journeys through hell.
"Li’s characters endure so much pain — whether through grief, disdain, loss or anger — but her cool, often detached style turns that pain into an object, something solid to consider . . . Pain doesn’t follow neat trajectories — any more than her short stories seek easy endings."
—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times (Best Fiction of 2023)
"One of our finest practitioners of the short story form returns with a dazzling new collection . . . Wednesday’s Child is full of woe, but Li’s fictions are never one-note—rather, they capture the full tapestry of the human condition. Packed with extraordinary beauty and quiet devastation, these stories cut quick and deep, like a knife in the dark."
—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire (20 Best Books of 2023)
“A skilled impressionist, Li juxtaposes sensuous images . . . with aphoristic daggers . . . The tight scope of the stories keeps sentimentality at the fence, and the real lives of the characters in quarrelsome proximity . . . [Wednesday’s Child] reminds the reader that the best short fiction, even when it comments on the world at large, operates most powerfully on the level of the individual characters.”
—Kathleen Alcott, The New York Times Book Review
“What is markedly unusual about Ms. Li’s writing is that it rarely sinks into despair. Despite their background matter, the stories burble along with a facade of affability, cheerfully documenting the interactions of everyday routines . . . Ms. Li’s art is in revealing glimpses of the shadows underneath it without hauling them to the surface, like darkness glimpsed beneath a crust of ice . . . In this strange and distinctive collection, garrulity is a cover for a deeper speechlessness and hope is a disguise for fatalism.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Li’s career has spanned several mediums since then: a memoir of her life as a reader and several novels, including last year’s PEN/Faulkner-winning The Book of Goose. But these moments of genuine and surprising closeness — between estranged friends, between 19th-century writers and their contemporary readers, between care workers and new mothers, between mothers and their tragically lost children — appear throughout . . . One of the most affecting ways to reverse [harm]: to tell a story."
—Maddie Crum, Vulture (Best Books of 2023)
“This new collection of short stories by Yiyun Li will only enhance her reputation as one of the foremost fiction writers in America . . . Readers familiar with her work will recognize her signature style of layered, rich detail, stories within stories, and intertextuality in settings from America, China, and Europe . . . Li’s dense fiction weaves together history, memory, and experience. Her use of flashback and flash-forward eclipses time and space, challenging and delighting at every turn.”
—Elizabeth Fifer, World Literature Today
“Many of the pieces centre on the painful unspooling of memories as life continues . . . In Wednesday’s Child, death is everywhere, sudden and awful . . . Against the backdrop of threat, Li’s characters meditate coolly on meaning and mortality.”
—Anthony Cummins, The Observer
“Li affords her characters a unique sort of dignity, not belittling their grief as something to be neatly solved in a clever plot point . . . There’s something timeless to many of the stories here . . . [Li’s] once again shown us why she’s remained such a treasured guide to the lands of grief over the past twenty-plus years.
—Ian J. Battaglia, Chicago Review of Books
“Li is a master at understanding human emotion, but her tenderness never gives way to sentimentality . . . Gorgeous prose and painstaking attention to detail . . . makes these stories so beautiful, so accomplished. This is a perfect collection by a writer at the top of her game, and a heart-wrenching look at how loss changes not only the bereaved, but their entire existence.”
—Michael Schaub, NPR
“Quiet, subtle and often agonisingly wrenching . . . Li explores the brittle fractures within the human heart. . . Parents, children, the fragility of life, the difficulty of surviving deep wounds—Li lays this territory bare with sympathy and without a shred of sentimentality . . . Piece by piece, this collection becomes a shimmering meditation on bad luck, on accidents and fleeting moments in time. Lives are changed and hearts shattered. But it also touches on unexpected connections and the strangeness of love, and the faint possibility of hope that can be found in old songs or books, in art or conversations with strangers.”
—Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times
"[Li’s] prose . . . is so elegant and thoughtful you don’t immediately notice it when she pulls the rug out from under you in this collection of dreamy, devastating stories.”
—Patrick Rapa, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Each story here is as strong as the other; it’s impossible to pick favorites . . . this collection [is] perhaps [Li’s] most compelling yet.”
—Susan Blumberg-Kason, Asian Review of Books
“This return to short fiction . . . should remind those not already passing copies of The Vagrants along to their friends like they’re introductory leaflets to some secret society why they fell in love with Li in the first place.”
—Allen Charles, The Millions
“A collection of short fiction with unexpected power, though its economy is no surprise: Li’s elegant prose gives no quarter to the superfluous . . . [Li’s characters are] all achingly real and needy and yet mysterious in the ways we humans always are to each other.”
—Bethanne Patrick, The Los Angeles Times
“When I read Yiyun Li’s fiction, I never wonder why things are as they are in the world of the story or novel . . . Things are included because they are so. They are true. There’s no arguing about life, and that is my experience of reading the work: it is always surprising, and it could never be any other way.”
—Elizabeth McCracken, Electric Literature
"Few writers tackle the way grief reverberates through our lives with Li’s frankness, tact, and humor."
—Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture
“Breaks may be required between these 11 stellar stories, both to absorb the brilliance of Li’s prose and to honor the breathtaking heartbreak trapped within . . . [An] exquisite collection . . . Storytellers become lifesavers—ironically, tragically, even of the dead.”
—Terry Hong, Booklist (starred)
“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)
