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 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.

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 memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. 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.

From Patricia Engel, the author of Infinite Country, comes The Faraway World, a collection of ten exquisite short stories that span across the Americas. These narratives are linked by recurring themes of migration, sacrifice, and moral compromise.

In these pages, readers encounter two Colombian expats who cross paths as strangers on the rainy streets of New York City, each grappling with their own traumatic histories. In Cuba, a woman uncovers the unsettling truth that her deceased brother's bones have been taken, while the love of her life makes a fleeting return from Ecuador for a single night's visit. Meanwhile, a cash-strapped couple in Miami find themselves engaged in a life-altering hustle.

Engel's stories are intimate and panoramic, capturing the liminality of regret, the pulsating essence of community, and the monumental and understated moments that define love. The Faraway World is a testament to Engel's storytelling prowess, offering a lens through which to view humanity with a more generous and tender perspective.