Yiyun Li, Author . Random $21.95 (205p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6312-3
A beautifully executed debut collection of 10 stories explores the ravages of the Cultural Revolution on modern Chinese, both in China and America. "Extra" portrays the grim plight of Granny Lin, an elderly widow without a pension, whose job
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Yiyun Li, Author . Random $25 (337p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6313-0
Li's magnificent and jaw-droppingly grim novel centers on the 1979 execution of a Chinese counterrevolutionary in the provincial town of Muddy River and spirals outward into a scathing indictment of Communist China. Former Red Guard leader Shan
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Yiyun Li, Random, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6813-5
The nine brilliant stories in Li's collection (after The Vagrants) offer a frighteningly lucid vision of human fate. In the title story, motherless Siyu has long been in love with an older zoology professor, Dai, who suddenly wants Siyu, 38 and...
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Yiyun Li. Random, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6814-2
Li (The Vagrants) became one of the writers in the New Yorker’s prestigious “20 Under 40” list, largely on the strength of her widely anthologized short stories, but in her second novel we follow a group of friends who came of age in Tiananmen...
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Yiyun Li. Random House, $28 (238p) ISBN 978-0-399-58909-6
The vexed intersection between writing and living (or not living) is explored in these ruminative essays. Novelist Li (Kinder Than Solitude) explores tenuous subjects—ruptures in time, the difficulty of writing autobiographical fiction, the...
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Yiyun Li. Random House, $25 (192p) ISBN 978-1-984817-37-2
This heart-wrenching experimental novel from Li (The Vagrants) is framed as a dialogue between a writer and Nikolai, the teenage son she lost to suicide. The novel’s title comes from a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, and poetry is very much on the...
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Yiyun Li. Random House, $27 (348p) ISBN 978-0-399-58912-6
Li (Where Reasons End) writes with relentless seriousness about a woman taking stock of her past while living in a nursing home. Lilia Liska, 81, works on annotating the collected letters of Roland Bouley, a Canadian writer, and writing a personal...
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Yiyun Li. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28 (368p) ISBN 978-0-374-60634-3
Li follows Must I Go with an intriguing novel of two devious teenage friends who are coping with the aftermath of WWII. Fabienne helps her drunken father, a widower, on their Saint Rèmy farm, and her friend Agnès lives with her parents and attends...
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Yiyun Li. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-0-374-60637-4
The protagonists of Li’s splendid and elegantly observed collection (after the novel The Book of Goose) desire to lead purposeful lives. “A Sheltered Woman” centers on Chinese immigrant and postpartum nanny Auntie Mei, who lives with her clients for
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