Books by Yiyun Li (6)


1.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers : Stories by Yiyun Li EN

Rating: 5 (1 vote)
Country: Asia / China flag China
Description:
Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose. “Immortality,” winner of ... continue

2.

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li EN

Rating: 5 (2 votes)
Country: Asia / China flag China
Description:
"The stories in this collection are mostly set in the China of the 21st century, where economic development has led to situations unknown to previous decades: residents in a shabby block of flats witnessing in awe the property 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 an alleged affair of her father. Beneath the veneer of prosperity and opportunity, however, lie the struggles ... continue

3.

Must I Go by Yiyun Li EN

Rating: 3 (1 vote)
Country: Asia / China flag China
Description:
Lilia Liska is eighty-one. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the birth 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. Drawn into an obsession over 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 her sharply incisive and deeply moving commentary. She reve... continue

4.

The Book of Goose : A Novel by Yiyun Li EN

Rating: 4 (3 votes)
Country: Asia / China flag China
Description:
A propulsive, gripping new novel about fate, art, exploitation, and intimacy by the award-winning author of Where Reasons End.

5.

The Vagrants : A Novel by Yiyun Li EN

Rating: 3 (1 vote)
Country: Asia / China flag China
Description:
In luminous prose, award-winning author Yiyun Li weaves together the lives of unforgettable characters who are forced to make moral choices, and choices for survival, in China in the late 1970s. Shortlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Morning dawns on the provincial city of Muddy River. A young woman, Gu Shan, a bold spirit and a follower of Chairman Mao, has renounced her faith in Communism. Now a political prisoner, she is to be executed for her dissent. Her distraught mother, determined to follow the custom of burning her only child’s clothing to ease her journey ... continue

6.
Things in Nature Merely Grow

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li EN

Rating: 5 (1 vote)
Country: Asia / China flag China
Description:
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. “There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. “There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.” There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li ... continue
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