Author
Yiyun Li
Birth Date
November 4, 1972
(53 Years)
Associated Country
United States
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist known for her elegant prose and penetrating examinations of memory, loneliness, family, and political history. Born in Beijing, China, she moved to the United States in the 1990s and began writing in English, developing a distinctive literary voice characterized by emotional precision, psychological depth, and understated style.
She is the author of several acclaimed works, including the novels The Vagrants, Kinder Than Solitude, Where Reasons End, and Book of Goose, as well as the short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Her fiction often explores the lasting effects of personal and political trauma, the complexities of human relationships, and the ways individuals seek meaning in the face of isolation and loss.
Li has received numerous literary honors and is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary writers working in English. In addition to her fiction, she has written essays and memoirs that reflect on literature, grief, language, and the role of storytelling in understanding human experience. Her work is celebrated for its intellectual rigor, emotional honesty, and profound insight into the inner lives of her characters.
She is the author of several acclaimed works, including the novels The Vagrants, Kinder Than Solitude, Where Reasons End, and Book of Goose, as well as the short story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Her fiction often explores the lasting effects of personal and political trauma, the complexities of human relationships, and the ways individuals seek meaning in the face of isolation and loss.
Li has received numerous literary honors and is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary writers working in English. In addition to her fiction, she has written essays and memoirs that reflect on literature, grief, language, and the role of storytelling in understanding human experience. Her work is celebrated for its intellectual rigor, emotional honesty, and profound insight into the inner lives of her characters.
Books
In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field, an awkward and sensitive child, is preternaturally gifted, and his family envisions him becoming the...
“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...
Wednesday's Child 2023
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...
The Book of Goose 2022
Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised—the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years...
Must I Go 2020
Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man...
Where Reasons End 2019
The narrator of Where Reasons End writes, “I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing it over again, this time by...
Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a luminous account of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My...
Kinder Than Solitude 2014
Moving back and forth in time, between America today and China in the 1990s, Kinder Than Solitude is the story of three people whose lives are changed by a murder one of them may have committed. As...
In the title story, a professor introduces her middle-aged son to a favorite student, unaware of the student's true affections. In "A Man Like Him," a lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a man...
The Vagrants 2010
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...
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,...