With great tenderness, tact and humor, these stories open a world that is culturally remote from us, and at the same time as humanly intimate as if its people were our own family and their thoughts the thoughts that lie nearest our own hearts.
Yiyun Li’s first collection of short stories reminds you just how big a story can be, and how a wonderful collection—and this collection is more than wonderful, it is extraordinary—contains endless worlds and truths and pleasures. With wit, ruthlessness, and an understanding of human nature—its grand follies, private sorrows, and petty dreams—A Thousand Years of Good Prayers may remind you of Flannery O’Connor, though Li is an original. She’ll make you laugh out loud, and then she’ll break your heart. Read this book and marvel at a writer both at the height of her powers, and at the start of a brilliant career.
Yiyun Li is a true storyteller. Great stories offer us the details of life on the riverbanks: birth, family, dinner, and love, all framing the powerful flow of terror, death, political change, the river itself. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is as grand an epic and as tenderly private as a reader could wish.