Yiyun Li

On September 2, Li takes the stage at Joe’s Pub for “Seriously Celebrating The New Yorker’s 100th Anniversary: Fiction.

Yiyun Li writes with an unhurried intensity, crafting fiction that inhabits the spaces where memory, choice, and human connection take shape. Born and raised in Beijing under the constraints of Communist austerity, she grew up with an insatiable hunger for stories — devouring Russian classics like Tolstoy and Turgenev, always yearning for more. Li moved to the United States to study immunology at the University of Iowa, but she was drawn to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she discovered her path as a storyteller writing in English.

Since then, Li has built an extraordinary body of work: five novels (including Where Reasons End and The Book of Goose), two short story collections, and two books of nonfiction. Her fiction and essays have earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and many others. Her most recent book, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is a memoir that meditates on unthinkable loss and radical acceptance. Across forms, her work is defined by a quiet precision and emotional depth that have secured her place among the most vital voices in contemporary literature.

Purchase A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925–2025 via our virtual storefront on Bookshop.org, the bookselling platform that supports independent bookstores. A portion of proceeds from all book purchases will go toward helping support SpeakEasy’s nonprofit mission and our literary programs on stage, in schools, and on the road with The SpeakEasy Bookmobile.