A collection of brand-new short stories written by major international writers and inspired by Kafka - to commemorate one hundred years since his death Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Few writers have inspired as much interpretation, adaptation and imitation as he has - from films to novels to memes - and very few artists in any field have created work that captures so resonantly the fraught peculiarity of our existence. What happens when Kafka's idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of anxiety attacks, these specially commissioned stories speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

‘Any new book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration’ Sigrid Nunez ‘One of our finest living authors’ New York Times A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, aging and the strangeness of contemporary life – from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. 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 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 breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child articulate the true cost of living with all Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom.

A collection of brand-new short stories written by major international writers and inspired by Kafka - to commemorate one hundred years since his death Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Few writers have inspired as much interpretation, adaptation and imitation as he has - from films to novels to memes - and very few artists in any field have created work that captures so resonantly the fraught peculiarity of our existence. What happens when Kafka's idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of anxiety attacks, these specially commissioned stories speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout - I loved it' Charlotte Mendelson 'One of our finest living authors ... propulsively entertaining' New York Times 'Wonderfully strange and alive' Jon McGregor A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons End Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnes, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised - the place that Fabienne helped Agnes escape ten years ago. Now, Agnes is free to tell her story. As children in a backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves - until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnes on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnes can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie. 'Beguiling ... A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation' Daily Mail 'Brilliant ... A novel of deceptions and cruelty' Spectator 'For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry...resonant with echoes of... My Brilliant Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout... electrifying' Observer

'Dazzlingly and daringly written' Rachel Cooke, Observer W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of dishevelled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of permanence. Bette Howland was one of those patients. In 1968, Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a librarian; and labouring day and night at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon, while staying at her friend Saul Bellow's apartment, she swallowed a bottle of pills. W-3 is a vivid - and often surprisingly funny - portrait of the extraordinary community of Ward 3 and a record of a defining moment in a writer's life. The book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave. Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End. 'W-3 is one hell of a debut' Lucy Scholes, Paris Review 'Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes, iNews

A selection of Michel de Montaigne's most profound, searching essays, in a new translation and stunning hardback edition 'I myself am the subject of my book'. So wrote Montaigne in the introductory note to his Essays, the book that marked the birth of the modern essay form. In works of probing intelligence and idiosyncratic observation, Montaigne moved from intimate personal reflection to roving theories of the conduct of kings and cannibals, the effects of sorrow and fear, and the fallibility of human memory and judgement. This new selection of Montaigne's most ingenious essays appears in a lucid new translation by the prize-winning David Coward. What Do I Know? offers the modern reader profound insight into a great Renaissance mind.

'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout - I loved it' Charlotte Mendelson 'One of our finest living authors ... propulsively entertaining' New York Times 'Wonderfully strange and alive' Jon McGregor A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons End Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnes, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised - the place that Fabienne helped Agnes escape ten years ago. Now, Agnes is free to tell her story. As children in a backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves - until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnes on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnes can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie. 'Beguiling ... A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation' Daily Mail 'Brilliant ... A novel of deceptions and cruelty' Spectator 'For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry...resonant with echoes of... My Brilliant Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout... electrifying' Observer

A dazzling new collection of short stories written over a decade, spanning loss, alienation, ageing and the strangeness of contemporary life – from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose.

A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. 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 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 breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child articulate the true cost of living with all Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom.

'W-3 is one hell of a debut' Lucy Scholes, Paris Review 'At moments dazzlingly and daringly written' Rachel Cook, Observer 'Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes, iNews W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of dishevelled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of permanence. Bette Howland was one of those patients. In 1968, Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a librarian; and labouring day and night at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon, while staying at her friend Saul Bellow's apartment, she swallowed a bottle of pills. W-3 is a vivid - and often surprisingly funny - portrait of the extraordinary community of Ward 3 and a record of a defining moment in a writer's life. The book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave. Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End. 'For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin-real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way . . . At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.'

Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we have 'This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.' Meg Wolitzer Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed by this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events. Gradually she undercuts Roland's charming but arrogant voice with an incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to her daughter, Lucy, who took her own life at the age of 27. Must I Go is an unconventional epistolary novel, a gleefully one-way correspondence between the very-much-alive Lilia and the long-departed Roland. Though mortality is ever-present, this is ultimately a novel about life, in all its messy glory. Life lived, for the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With exquisite subtlety and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.

The second collection of stories from Yiyun Li, author of the Guardian First Book Award-winning A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants. The stories in this collection, like the stories in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, are mostly set in China. The country portrayed here is the China of the 21st century, where economic development has led to new situations unknown to previous decades: residents in a shabby apartment building witnessing in awe the real estate boom; a local entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist sheltering women in trouble in her mansion; a group of retired women discovering fame late in their lives as private investigators specialising in extramarital affairs; a young woman setting up a blog to publicise the alleged affair of her father. Underneath the veneer of prosperity and opportunity, however, lie the struggles of characters trying to reorient themselves in the unfamiliar landscapes of modern China: a widower, reminiscing about his wife, confronts a young unmarried woman purchasing condoms in a pharmacy; a new wife makes a plea to have a baby with her husband who was to be executed only to discover that she has become an instant celebrity; a middle-aged couple in America, who, upon losing their only daughter, return to their hometown in China to hire a young woman as a surrogate mother. These characters' fates are affected as much by the historical moments in which they reside as by the choices they make. Yiyun Li's new collection of stories is a report from the front-line of a changing world, and confirms Li to be a writer not to be missed.

'Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers From the critically acclaimed author of The Vagrants, a devastating and utterly original novel on grief and motherhood 'Days: the easiest possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into an ally or an enemy to myself.' A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life itself, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone. Where Reasons End is an extraordinary portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy, humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child. 'A masterpiece. This book haunts me more than any other novel I've read in recent years' Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You 'Heart-wrenching, fearless, and unlike anything you've ever read' Esquire 'I sit here shaken and, I think, changed by this work' Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers 'A devastating read, but also a tender one, filled with love, complexity, and a desire for understanding' Nylon 'The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time' Sean Andrew Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less 'Captures the affections and complexity of parenthood in a way that has never been portrayed before' The Millions 'Ethereal and electric, radiating unthinkable pain and profound love' Buzzfeed

Brilliant and original, ‘A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’ introduces a remarkable first collection of stories about China from an author set to become a major literary talent. In this extraordinary first collection, Yiyun Li brings us a modern China facing up to a complex history of repression and guilt. In 'Immortality', winner of the Paris Review prize, a young man bears a striking resemblance to the dictator, and so finds a strange kind of calling. In 'Extra', first published in the New Yorker, a Chinese woman, alone in middle age, befriends a young boy who has become an outcast in a remote country school. In their friendship, we see how love can begin to overcome the strictures that dominate their lives. In turn horrifying and breathtakingly lyrical, Yiyun Li, a new and talented young Chinese writer, confronts the silence that dominated the history of her country, and illuminates how mythology, politics, history and culture intersect with personality. She leaves us with an enduring vision of a country undergoing tremendous change.

The much-anticipated first novel from the Guardian First Book Award-winning Chinese writer. In the provincial town of Muddy Waters in China, a young woman named Gu Shan is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twenty-eight years old and has already spent ten years in prison. The citizens stage a protest after her death and, over the following six weeks, the town goes through uncertainty, hope and fear until eventually the rebellion is brutally suppressed. They are all taken on a painful journey, from one young woman's death to another. We follow the pain of Gu Shan's parents, the hope and fear of the leaders of the protest and their families. Even those who seem unconnected to the tragedy - an eleven-year-old boy seeking fame and glory, a nineteen-year-old village idiot in love with a young and deformed girl, an old couple making a living by scavenging the town's garbage cans - are caught up in a remorseless turn of events. Yiyun Li's novel is based on the true story which took place in China in 1979.

Published to accompany the major retrospective exhibition on Hung Liu, "Summoning Ghosts" is a comprehensive look at the work of this extraordinary Chinese-American artist. A pioneer in Chinese contemporary art before the Chinese avant-garde came into being, Lui's life spanned two centuries and bridged two totally different economic situations. The wide-ranging essays in this book, which features 140 color illustrations, reflect on how Hung Liu's evocative art is inextricably bound to her equally rich and complex life. While considering the artist's primary work as a painter, the contributors also celebrate her murals, permanent and temporary installations, photography, and video.

'Profoundly engaging in depth, with remarkable subtlety and rare, limpid beauty. A must-read' - Mary Gaitskill A luminous memoir about reading, writing and how to find meaning in a life Written over two years while the author battled depression, Dear Friend is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Interweaving personal memoir with a wide-ranging celebration of writers and books, this is a journey of recovery through literature. From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Kierkegaard and Larkin, Yiyun Li traces the themes of time and transformation, presence and absence. Drawing on personal experiences from her difficult childhood in China, she constructs a beautiful, interior exploration of selfhood and what is required to choose life.

Read the "Time" magazine review about "the most significant Penguin Classic ever published."

In the early twentieth century, as China came up against the realities of the modern world, Lu Xun effected a shift in Chinese letters away from the ornate, obsequious literature of the aristocrats to the plain, expressive literature of the masses. His celebrated short stories assemble a powerfully unsettling portrait of the superstition, poverty, and complacency that he perceived in late imperial China and in the revolutionary republic that toppled the last dynasty in 1911. This volume presents Lu Xun's complete fiction in bracing new translations and includes such famous works as "The Real Story of Ah-q," "Diary of a Madman," and "The Divorce." Together they expose a contradictory legacy of cosmopolitan independence, polemical fractiousness, and anxious patriotism that continues to resonate in Chinese intellectual life today.

'A dazzling, subtle, skilful knockout - I loved it' Charlotte Mendelson 'One of our finest living authors ... propulsively entertaining' New York Times 'Wonderfully strange and alive' Jon McGregor A propulsive, seductive new novel about friendship, exploitation and intimacy from the prize-winning author of Where Reasons End Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnes, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised - the place that Fabienne helped Agnes escape ten years ago. Now, Agnes is free to tell her story. As children in a backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves - until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnes on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. A dark, ravishing tale winding from the rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnes can live without her past. The Book of Goose is a story of intimacy and obsession, friendship and rivalry perfect for fans of Elena Ferrante, Ottessa Moshfegh and Kamila Shamsie. 'Beguiling ... A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation' Daily Mail 'Brilliant ... A novel of deceptions and cruelty' Spectator 'For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry...resonant with echoes of... My Brilliant Friend, as well Elizabeth Strout... electrifying' Observer

Short Stories By Yiyun Li, Translated by Arezou Mokhtarian