Description

About the Author

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.

Praise for Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories…

“[Resonates] with emotion . . . Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is an example of the treasure an artist can fashion from the raw materials of ordinary existence.”—Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review

“Yiyun Li is extraordinary, a storyteller of the first order. Each tale in this collection is as wild and beautiful and thorny as a heart.”—Junot Díaz

“A moving and unforgettable  experience . . . Yiyun Li’s characters, like the stories they inhabit, often seem at first glance quiet, modest and unassuming. [But] there is considerable drama hidden beneath the placid surfaces they present to the world.”—The Washington Post
 
“Yiyun Li is a marvel. . . . Her writing is lyrical, circular and finely etched, with an emotional impact that both satisfies and surprises.”—NPR
 
“Li has been called ‘China’s Chekhov,’ and it’s easy to see why: With their quiet authority, exquisite control, and illumination of those quicksilver moments on which entire lives pivot, [her] tales lodge in your rib cage long after you’ve finished reading.”—Marie Claire