Main Event: Many Voices with Yiyun Li

Date and Time for this Past Event

• Monday, Nov 6, 2023  6:30pm - 8pm

Location

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Details

The Main Event: Many Voices series returns with four captivating speakers sharing their stories and their most recent work. This month's speaker is award-winning writer Yiyun Li.

For the Chinese-born American writer Yiyun Li, fiction can be a way to retrieve memory, to escape circumstance, or to reclaim one’s consciousness from the influence of others. Her books, which include five acclaimed novels, two short story collections, and two books of nonfiction, are richly observed, and deeply felt.

Her most recent novel, "The Book of Goose," won the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It tells of two girls raised in the French countryside following WWII. In starred review, BookPage wrote, "Not since Elena Ferrante’s 'My Brilliant Friend' has a novel so deftly probed the magical and sometimes destructive friendships that can occur between two girls ... an elegant and disturbing novel about exploitation and acquiescence, notoriety and obscurity, and whether you choose your life or are chosen by it." The New York Times Book Review noted, "Li [is] one of our finest living authors: Her elegant metaphysics never elide the blood and maggots." "The Book of Goose" was named a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, TIME, Slate, NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, and others.

Listen as Yiyun Li shares her story — and her stories included in her most recent release, "Wednesday's Child."