A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Reviews

Li has an elegant way of delivering a story; ... there is a gracefulness to her style, a subtlety that runs throughout.

Stylistically the stories recall folktales - stylised, somewhat one- dimensional; stream of consciousness is seldom used. We observe action and listen to dialogue. From that we must deduce thoughts and feelings. And we can, thanks to the writer's skill.

Li’s writing is beautifully spare and controlled. She shows how lives and personalities are shaped by historical change — in intimate ways not recorded in history books.

Yiyun has the talent, the vision and the respect for life's insoluble mysteries to be a truly fine writer. There is a strangeness at the heart of her fiction that comes from somewhere other than China - a world inside the author.

Li found just the right time and place to tell her luminous, beautifully-written tales of characters struggling to emerge from the shadows of a dark past.

Yiyun Li writes about everyday people, everyday life, and everyday joys and sorrows in a spare style that wastes no words. Each one is wellchosen, used in a quiet, unassuming manner, to create whole lives in the course of a dozen or so pages.

It's one of those rare short story collections where you find yourself reading one perfectly realized gem after the next.

"A Thousand Years of Good Prayers," stories set in China and America, are written in a quiet style dependent more on detail than sudden movement or violent overstatement: old-fashioned showing versus telling.

Li's stories surprise with their inventiveness, simplicity and dedication to presenting Chinese people as neither archetypes of socialist exoticism nor divorced from their cultural and historical circumstances.

Writing in limpid prose, she shows no interest in authorial tricks.

Li does more than simply provide a human face for a set of statistics. Her compassion for her own creations persuades us that they are worth caring for.

[Li] places readers in a variety of characters' shoes for a moment in time, long enough for them to get at least a glimpse of the historical, emotional, and cultural contexts that lie beyond.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is not only an outstanding first book of fiction by a young writer, it is a literary event that transcends language. Li's stories express an inexpressible joy.

This originality doesn't consist of experimental modes of narration or quirkiness of prose style. It consists of the fact that the stories all deal with very different kinds of experiences, are told from a variety of viewpoints, and yet all share the same high level of intelligence.

The 10 stories introduce an accomplished, existing voice to the contemporary American fiction scene.

The stories in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers are both contemporary and universal. What's clear from this volume is that the delineations of this writer's talent have only begun to come into view.

Thoughtful, deceptively quiet, and always surprising, these seamless stories remind us that regardless of the society we inhabit, the most basic human emotions-love and longing, loneliness and regret-transcend history and geography, and are universal, timeless, and endlessly mysterious.

It's clear that Li has mastered the strategies of fiction. She elevates patient endurance to near-heroic stature in these stories of ordinary lives swept back and forth by the tides of history and politics. This book may be one of the year's most auspicious debuts.

American readers can now celebrate that one of the best new fiction writers of the year learned English as a second language. Even when you employ the highest standard, which is to say, the Nabokovian standard, you have to admit that her book seems to be an extraordinary feat of intelligence and style.

[...] expertly plumb lives silenced by disappointment, where release can come in unexpected forms and as suddenly as a long-forgotten memory.

No matter the theme-be it human redundancy in an overpopulated country or the complex nature of the parent-child relationship-these stories are complex, moving, and surprising.

Some ungainly plotting, but the author is one to watch.

Self-effacing maternal love, extreme societal pressures, betrayal, and peculiar convictions all make for provocative and memorable fiction that is simultaneously culturally specific and universal.

A beautifully executed debut collection. These are powerful stories that encapsulate tidily epic grief and longing.