Yiyun Li is the author of the novels Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, and The Vagrants; the story collections Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I write to You in Your Life. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Whiting Award in Fiction. She was named by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Under 40” fiction writers to watch. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband and their two sons.
-
A Thousand Years of Good PrayersStoriesFrom"Extra"
Several times a day Granny Lin bathes Old Tang: in the morning and before bedtime, and whenever he wets or dirties himself. The private bathroom is what Granny Lin likes best about her marriage. For all her life, she has used public bathrooms, fighting with other slippery bodies for the lukewarm water drizzling from the rusty showers. Now that she has a bathroom all to herself, she never misses any chance to use it.
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers:Stories -
A Thousand Years of Good PrayersStoriesFrom"Immorality"
Our bodies freeze. We look at the boy’s face. Even with his swollen face and black eyes, we have no problem telling that he has the face of the dictator, young and rebellious, just as in the illustrations in the books about the dictator’s heroic childhood. The boy stands up and limps to his mother. We look at his face in awe, not daring to move when he spits bloody phlegm at our feet.
“Remember this face,” the boy says. “You will have to pay for this one day.”
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers:Stories -
A Thousand Years of Good PrayersStoriesFrom"A Thousand Years of Good Prayers"
A rocket scientist, Mr. Shi tells people when they ask about his profession in China. Retired, he then adds, out of modesty, when people marvel. Mr. Shi learned the phrase from a woman during a layover at Detroit, when he tried to explain to her his work, drawing pictures when his English failed to help. ‘A rocket scientist!” the woman exclaimed, laughing out loud.
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers:Stories
“Li's novel skillfully ravels each skein of the story, cutting back and forth in time as well as between East and West, building tension as it goes. The clean, chiseled beauty of her prose draws us deeper and deeper into these tormented characters, revealing the full extent of who they are and what has gone on between them . . . Rarely are ordinary humans given such eloquent witness.” —The Washington Post [on Kinder Than Solitude]
“In this most amazing first novel, Yiyun Li has found a way to combine the jeweled precision of her short-story-writer's gaze with a spellbinding vision of the power of the human spirit to not only survive near-annihilation, but to open up a space in the devastation for some kind of healing.” —Chicago Tribune [on The Vagrants]
“American readers can now celebrate that one of the best new fiction writers of the year learned English as a second language. Even when you employ the highest standard, which is to say, the Nabokovian standard, you have to admit that her book seems to be an extraordinary feat of intelligence and style.” —The San Francisco Chronicle [on A Thousand Years of Good Prayers]
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Bookshop
- Print Books
- Find your local bookstore (via IndieBound)
- Bookshop
