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.

Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival of 17 grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.

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.

A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace but not yet, not quite, gone.

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.

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 126 families and looked after 131 babies, one set of clients easily replaced by the next. But the 132nd baby and his mother, Chanel, prompts a crisis in Auntie Mei's life - a tremor that threatens to destroy her resolute detachment.

“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. 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.” There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James.