Gold Boy, Emerald Girl - by Yiyun Li (Paperback)

About the Book

Includes "A Reader's Guide" (p. 227-235).

Book Synopsis

In these spellbinding stories, Yiyun Li, a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, and one of The New Yorker's top 20 fiction writers under 40, gives us exquisite stories in which politics and folklore magnificently illuminate the human condition. A professor introduces her middle-aged son to a favorite student, unaware of the student's true affections. A lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a man wrongly accused of an indiscretion. Six women establish a private investigating agency to battle extramarital affairs in Beijing. Written in lyrical prose and with stunning honesty, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl introduces us to worlds strange and familiar, creating a mesmerizing and vibrant landscape of life.

Review Quotes

"[Resonates] with emotion . . . Gold Boy, Emerald Girl is an example of the treasure an artist can fashion from the raw materials of ordinary existence."--Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review

"A moving and unforgettable experience . . . Yiyun Li's characters, like the stories they inhabit, often seem at first glance quiet, modest and unassuming. [But] there is considerable drama hidden beneath the placid surfaces they present to the world."--The Washington Post

"Yiyun Li is a marvel. . . . Her writing is lyrical, circular and finely etched, with an emotional impact that both satisfies and surprises."--NPR

"Li has been called 'China's Chekhov, ' and it's easy to see why: With their quiet authority, exquisite control, and illumination of those quicksilver moments on which entire lives pivot, [her] tales lodge in your rib cage long after you've finished reading."--Marie Claire

About the Author

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 a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 fiction issue. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.