
REPLAY: Yiyun Li on Grief, Attention, Deep Reading, and the Writing Life
Otherppl with Brad Listi
Meaning, Fate, and Writing Others' Stories
Yiyun says she stopped seeking life's meaning and channels energy into writing other people's stories instead.
Today on the program, a trip into the archive and a return to Episode 863, my conversation with Yiyun Li from 2023.
Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Wednesday’s Child; The Book of Goose; Must I Go; Where Reasons End; Kinder Than Solitude; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; The Vagrants; and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers—and the memoirs Things in Nature Merely Grow and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham–Campbell Prize, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has 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 and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Original air date: September 6, 2023.
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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers.
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