Wednesday's Child: Stories

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 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