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Yiyun Li Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li

How to pronounce Yiyun Li: ee-yoon lee

Yiyun Li Biography

Yiyun Li is the author of six works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University.

Yiyun Li's website

This bio was last updated on 09/02/2022. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

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Books by this Author

Books by Yiyun Li at BookBrowse
Wednesday's Child jacket The Book of Goose jacket Where Reasons End jacket Gold Boy, Emerald Girl jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Yiyun Li but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Li Cunxin

    Li Cunxin

    Li Cunxin was born into an extremely poor peasant family in Qingdoa, a remote commune village in Northern China in 1961.

    The sixth son in a family of seven sons, he lived in a small house with twenty of his relatives. The ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

    Try:
    Mao's Last Dancer
    by Li Cunxin

  • Elizabeth Gilbert

    Elizabeth Gilbert

    Elizabeth Gilbert was born in 1969 in Connecticut.  She grew up on a small family tree farm, with her sister, novelist and historian Catharine Gilbert Murdock (author of Dairy Queen, the first in a series for teens).... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Book of Goose

    Try:
    City of Girls
    by Elizabeth Gilbert

We recommend 15 similar authors


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Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
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  • and much more!
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  • More about membership!

Top Picks

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    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
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    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
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    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...

BookBrowse Book Club

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In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
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The Story Collector
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From the international bestselling author of The Lost Bookshop!
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