Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li's debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and the California Book Award for fiction. Her subsequent works have also won numerous awards including the gold medal of California Book Award for fiction for The Vagrants; finalist of the Story Prize for Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; and her most recent book Kinder Than Solitude was published to critical acclaim. Other awards include, Whiting Award, Lannan Foundation Residency fellow, 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellow, and 2014 Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also been selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35 and by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. Yiyun Li is also a contributing editor to the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space. The New York Times says, “There's something about the poise, the tidiness, the seemingly effortless calm of Yiyun Li's writing that makes it easy to see her as an author who, like Jhumpa Lahiri, employs a Chekhovian neutrality to give the complicated, messy, ostensibly ‘colorful’ lives of her characters a kind of unthreatening watercolor ambience.” (strongstuff)… (more)

Yiyun Li (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The vagrants, Kinder than solitude, Gold boy, emerald girl)

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons. (added from Random House)… (more)

Yiyun Li (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The vagrants, Kinder than solitude, Gold boy, emerald girl)

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons. (added from Random House)… (more)

Yiyun Li (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The vagrants, Kinder than solitude, Gold boy, emerald girl)

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons. (added from Random House)… (more)

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Her new novel, Kinder Than Solitude, was published in February, 2014.

A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five, and The New Yorker named her one of twenty U.S. writers under forty to watch.

Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis.

Welles-Brown Room, Rush Rhees Library
April 16, 2014 5:00pm - 6:00pm (strongstuff)… (more)

Yiyun Li (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The vagrants, Kinder than solitude, Gold boy, emerald girl)

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons. (added from Random House)… (more)

Yiyun Li (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The vagrants, Kinder than solitude, Gold boy, emerald girl)

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons. (added from Random House)… (more)

SUN, MAR 30 AT 5PM

Join Sarah and Brian C. the last Sunday of every month as we use wonderful books to travel the world. We are currently discussing books in the Chinese fiction genre, and this month we are reading The vagrants by Yiyun Li.

Location: Street: 603 N Lamar Blvd City: Austin, Province: Texas Postal Code: 78703-5413 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Yiyun Li (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The vagrants, Kinder than solitude, Gold boy, emerald girl)

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons. (added from Random House)… (more)

A profound mystery is at the heart of this magnificent new novel by Yiyun Li, "one of America's best young novelists" (Newsweek) and the celebrated author of The Vagrants, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. 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 one of the three observes, "Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime."

When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious "accident" in which a friend of theirs was poisoned. Grown up, the three friends are separated by distance and personal estrangement. Moran and Ruyu live in the United States, Boyang in China; all three are haunted by what really happened in their youth, and by doubt about themselves. In California, Ruyu helps a local woman care for her family and home, and avoids entanglements, as she has done all her life. In Wisconsin, Moran visits her ex-husband, whose kindness once overcame her flight into solitude. In Beijing, Boyang struggles to deal with an inability to love, and with the outcome of what happened among the three friends twenty years ago.

Brilliantly written, a breathtaking page-turner, Kinder than solitude resonates with provocative observations about human nature and life. In mesmerizing prose, and with profound insight, Yiyun Li unfolds this remarkable story, even as she explores the impact of personality and the past on the shape of a person's present and future.

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five, and The New Yorker named her one of twenty U.S. writers under forty to watch. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons.

Location: Street: 617 2nd St City: Davis, Province: California Postal Code: 95616-4620 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)