The author and Lynn Steger Strong discuss "Wednesday's Child," Li's new collection of short stories covering topics including loss, alienation, aging and the strangeness of contemporary life.
About the Book:
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.
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.
About the Speakers:
Yiyun Li is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University and director of the University's Program in Creative Writing at Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts. Her works include "Where Reasons End" and "Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life." Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages and she is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction in 2022 for her most recent novel "The Book of Goose."
Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels "Hold Still," "Want," and "Flight." Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at many colleges and Universities including Columbia University and, most recently, Bates College.
This event is co-presented by Labyrinth Books along and Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts and Humanities Council.
