Alienation

Named a Best Book of 2023 by the 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 and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday's Child, 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. Even before such moments, 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. Yiyun Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and un

The inspiring, haunting story of Chinese migrant workers rejected by the USA who built a new community in Mexico.From the 1850s, as the United States pushed west, Chinese migrants met ordinary Americans for the first time. Alienation and xenophobia lost the US this chance for cultural and economic enrichment—but America gave the Chinese new perspectives, connections, and dreams of their own. As teenagers, Hugo Wong’s great-grandfathers fled poverty in Guangdong for California. A decade later, excluded from the US, they helped establish a Chinese settlement across the border in Mexico, led by a world-famous dissident-in-exile with visions of a New China overseas. They would be among the Americas’ first Chinese magnates, meeting with presidents, generals, and missionaries, living through astonishing victories and humiliating defeats. The bitterest of all would be the colony’s tragic demise amid a violent Mexican revolution, leading to the largest massacre and deportation of Chinese in Am