Yiyun Li Selected Works

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.

A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.

Based on the War and Peace virtual book club hosted by A Public Space and Yiyun Li, Tolstoy Together is a guide and companion to Tolstoy’s masterpiece, with Li’s daily observations on the novel, writing, and “the solidity and structure” literature provides in unsettled times, including highlights from each day’s conversation, prompts for readers, and newly commissioned essays.

Lilia Liska has outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own version of events.