Yiyun Li wrote the short stories in Wednesday’s Child over fourteen years in which her life underwent many turbulent times and losses. Yet her stories carry a generous humor with them despite the difficult situations her characters face. That genuine humor and the author’s magical prose make each story one a reader wants to inhabit.
Li is a master of perspective, not only in the literary craft sense, but in the ability to give us characters so familiar as to feel real and yet surprising in their perspectives on life. Any fan of Elizabeth McCracken’s stories should enjoy those in Wednesday’s Child.
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Story Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and 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…
Scattered Snows, to the North, the latest collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Carl Phillips, feels like a return to his work in Tether, Rock Harbor, and Silverchest. The sensuous touch, which made fewer appearances in recent collections, is back. Erotic memory is as beguiling and unreliable as all memory. “Vikings” is emblematic of the wrestling Phillips is doing with the concept of the past and aging. Questioning memory’s unreliability to where one questions the present, because as we experience it, now immediately slips into memory.
An arresting study of memory, perception, and the human condition, from the Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips.
Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that’s based on human memory. If the poet’s last few books have concerned themselves with power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the usefulness of embracing it and of releasing ourselves from the need to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it happen? If we believe it didn’t, does that make our belief true?
This collection of eleven fabulous interconnected stories includes a queen who makes one too many promises; a man who bets on a horse who speaks to him; and a family who may have done-in its patriarch. All this against the backdrop of a world-changing event which inevitably, irrevocably, touches every life on the planet.
Each story focuses on a character dealing not only with the emerging situation, but with the events already unwinding in their lives. Kate Atkinson draws these characters with such richness and honesty, they feel familiar: friends, coworkers, and family. Funny and tragic.
A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels—the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.
Nothing is quite as it seems in this collection of eleven dazzling stories. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a man who bets on a horse that may—or may not—have spoken to him. Everything that readers love about the novels…
A wayward city, untethered by time or place. If you find yourself caught within its strange power, you are already lost.
All Stina wants is to escape a terrible date and get her VW out of the mud. João wants to return to his regiment fighting for the King of Portugal. Croydon tries to find his way back to his bicycle and his parents. But everyone caught in the unbound city must decide to either stay or leave for an ever-changing often dangerous world outside the city.
Many arrivals accept the city's power, others desire it for their own gain. One seeks to destroy it. But disrupting the city may trigger not just its destruction but the unmaking of the outside world.
