Yiyun Li

1 week ago | kansascity.com | Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li's memoir, "Things in Nature Merely Grow," stuns with its lucidity and with the nightmarish facts that prompted its writing. As Li explains, "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."Recommending Li's book feels like pushing people toward exposure therapy.

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Yiyun Li

Rossi’s Auto Repair and Full Service Gas had been there for as long as Maureen had been a resident of this New Jersey town. It was the last business along the only thoroughfare. Past it, the street shed its name and was called a highway, even though it was the same street, now lined with residential blocks. On the curb near the gas station was a bench, installed by whom Maureen did not know, and she seemed to be the only beneficiary.

3 weeks ago | yalereview.org | Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li my first conversation with Edmund White, in retrospect, was a perfect example of every conversation we would have when we became friends. It happened in 2016, in his Princeton office, which would later become mine. Soon, he would be retiring and I would be teaching at Princeton, and he often joked that I had been hired as his successor.

4 weeks ago | bookreporter.com | Yiyun Li

As more and more people are discussing their mental health openly, it is hard to have one memoir top another. Everyone’s issues are singular, personal to the point where readers sometimes can feel shy or uncomfortable knowing these things. Every once in a while, though, a Mary Karr, a Maggie Nelson or even a Tatum O’Neal presents a visceral and stinging account of a difficult life.

4 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Yiyun Li |Robert MacFarlane |Robert Macfarlane

Yiyun Li, authorThis past semester I taught The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf’s first novel, which is less read and talked about than her other books – to my undergraduates. One of the most interesting things about it is that Richard and Clarissa Dalloway appear as minor characters at the beginning. In each of my rereadings (and for my students who read the novel for the first time), when the Dalloways leave, it feels as though the air pressure of the novel drops for a moment.