Labyrinth and the Princeton Public Library are pleased to celebrate a new short story collection about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life by the author, just last year, of the award-winning The Book of Goose. Li will be talking about her new stories with fellow writer Lynn Steger Strong.
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. In the stories in Wednesday’s Child, 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 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, we must see it.
Yiyun Li is the author of Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, The Book of Goose, and of the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards and honors and teaches at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. 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 and has taught writing at many colleges and Universities including Columbia University and, most recently, Bates College.
This event is co-presented by the Princeton Public Library and co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts and Humanities Council.
