Showing results by author "Yiyun Li" in All Categories

Godlike Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, has built a beautiful city, but is also a terrible tyrant. In answer to the prayers of his oppressed citizens, the gods create Enkidu, a wild man whose destiny is to first fight Gilgamesh, and then become his life-long friend. They embark on adventures together, but when they kill the Bull of Heaven, Enkidu must pay the ultimate price.

A dazzling new collection of short stories, spanning 15 years of writing, from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End.

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 ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves—until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune and terrible loss.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2025 ‘The best book I have read this year’ DAVID NICHOLLS ‘Masterly … I'm in awe’ SALMAN RUSHDIE ‘Beautiful’ DOUGLAS STUART ‘Extraordinary’ SARAH MOSS ‘A formidable testament to a mother’s love’ SARA COLLINS...

Brought to you by Penguin. Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we have 'This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly...

Twenty-two of Greene's very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great novels: innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence. Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li, has arranged the stories into pairs, to be read together in contrast or in harmony – as a duel or a duet.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li. 'Days: the easiest possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to...

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...

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. What happens when his idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.

Acclaimed Pulitzer-Prize finalist Yiyun Li, returns with a sweeping historical epic, following two extraordinary musicians on the rise. In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a young musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field is able to hear notes in the air, and his family aspires...

Inequality. Influence. Fraud. Sabotage. These are the themes of great fiction and our modern economy. In this collection of short stories by some of today’s most scintillating writers, the rich get poorer and the poor get richer. Yeah, right! From the heartbreaking to the hilarious, here are eight instantly classic battles over currency, class, privilege - and social distance.

Lonely, thanklessly courteous, and without the benefit of status, Gordon Schulmeister is only tolerated in his younger, hip, and gentrified Oakland neighborhood. Now, amid the tensions of a pandemic, the cantankerousness of his landlord, and dog sitting an intimidating pit bull, Gordon has never felt the target on his back so acutely. To keep his neighbors off his heels, with some hope and a sigh, Gordon might have to finally speak up.

“One of our major novelists” (Salman Rushdie) tells the story of a woman reflecting on her uncompromising life, and the life of a former lover, in this provocative novel. “Yiyun Li is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.”—Meg Wolitzer, New York...

In her first memoir, award-winning novelist Yiyun Li offers a journey of recovery through literature: a letter from a writer to like-minded readers. “A meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.”—Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead “What a long way it is from...

A fearless writer confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love, "a masterpiece by a master” (Elizabeth McCracken, Vanity Fair). "Li has converted the messy and devastating stuff of life into a remarkable work of art.”—The Wall Street Journal WINNER...

Figures of the past find new life in Yiyun Li’s thrillingly imagined saga following two musicians as they mature, study, travel, love, grieve, and, above all, chase their ambitions. In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a young musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field, an...

Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. "The voice actor Suzanne Toren delivers a careful and sensitive reading, embodying the author’s calmly analytical mind, which is testament to the human ability to endure." — The Guardian...

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 ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a war-ravaged, backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves—until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

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.

Winner of the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize Auntie Mei is a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers. She has worked for a hundred and twenty-six families and looked after a hundred and thirty-one babies, one set of clients easily replaced by the next. But the hundred and thirty-second...