Poets & Writers Theater

"It’s life bleeding into stories. I feel like the longer we live, the more life bleeds into stories.” In this Books Are Magic event, Yiyun Li reads from her latest short story collection, Wednesday’s Child (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), and discusses story endings, why it can take years to finish a story, and what sustains a plotless story in a conversation with David Means.

Watch TIME Magazine’s compilation of their one hundred must-read books of 2022, which includes books by Nuar Alsadir, Franny Choi, Isaac Fitzgerald, CJ Hauser, Jay Hopler, Oscar Hokeah, Yiyun Li, Sarah Thankam Matthews, and Ocean Vuong. 

“You can slash a book. There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last.” Yiyun Li reads from her novel The Book of Goose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) in this Politics and Prose event with Maud Casey in Washington, D.C.

“I have an obligation to human beings, my characters, so that’s all I care about.” In this PEN International interview, Yiyun Li speaks about the expectation as a Chinese American writer to be a spokesperson for a particular experience, and how she enjoys exploring the interior struggles of her characters. Li won the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for her novel Where Reasons End (Random House, 2020).

“What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self.” Yiyun Li reads from her debut memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life (Random House, 2017), in this video produced by the Office of Communications at Princeton University. Li, whose novel Where Reasons End is forthcoming from Random House in February, is featured in “Portraits of Inspiration” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“A story is made up of situations.” In this Skillshare video, Yiyun Li explains the difference between an everyday situation and a story. Li’s debut memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life (Random House, 2017), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Melissa Faliveno, associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, leads a conversation with authors Wendy Lesser, Yiyun Li, Alejandro Murguia, D. A. Powell, and Michelle Tea about the personal, political, and professional reasons we choose to write while living in a culture, a family, or a community that doesn’t always value what we do.