Biographies / Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Biography

Yiyun Li was born in 1972 in Beijing. Along with her parents and one sister, she lived in an apartment complex built as housing for employees of the Department of Nuclear Industry, where her father worked as a physicist. In 1991 Li reported to Xinyang to complete one year of service in the Chinese army before going to college. After receiving her bachelor of science from Peking University, in 1996 she moved to the United States to study immunology at the University of Iowa. However, after taking a writing course as a way to improve her English, she found herself writing fiction. She decided to change the focus of her studies, entering the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop after receiving her master of science in 2000. She earned her master of fine arts in 2005 with a focus on fiction and creative nonfiction.

 

BOOK OF THE DAY
Review

Caret by Adam Mars-Jones review – God is in the detail

The latest instalment in the novelist’s series based around his idiosyncratic character John Cromer is a marvel of care and attention to language

Anthony Cummins

Mon 7 Aug 2023 07.00 BST

Adam Mars-Jones managed to find himself twice listed as one of Granta’s best young British novelists, in 1983 and 1993, despite the small matter of never having actually published a novel. Yet the judges were obviously on to something: Caret, his long-awaited new book, is the latest hefty chunk in a comic sequence – described by the author as “semi-infinite” – that, after Pilcrow (2008) and Cedilla (2011), now totals 2,000 pages, as if in overabundant repayment of a debt.

Review Caret by Adam Mars-Jones review – a semi-infinite novel

Review

Caret by Adam Mars-Jones review – a semi-infinite novel

This article is more than 3 years old

The third instalment in the brilliantly immersive autobiography of tragicomic creation John Cromer takes a picaresque tour of 1970s England

Sarah Crown

Wednesday 16 Augusto 2023

C

aret is the third volume of what Adam Mars-Jones’s publisher has dubbed a “semi-infinite novel”: the moment-by-moment autobiography of his tragicomic creation, John Cromer. Like the first two, it takes a proofreading mark for its title. Pilcrow, volume one, was named after the paragraph break symbol; the second, Cedilla, after the Ç accent. Caret, meanwhile, is a mark used by subeditors to indicate a missing word – so it’s clear from the off that Mars-Jones can take, or better yet make, a joke. The plain fact is that there are no missing words here: Caret runs to a whopping 752 pages of text that is dense both literally and figuratively; our hero is not a man to say in a sentence what he could plausibly spin out over the course of a page. No experience is too small to be described; no reflection (“And what is Fybogel? Pulverised isphagula husk, that’s what, and just about as chaffy as it’s possible to get”) too fleeting to set down. As with the first two volumes of Cromer’s story, this is fictional autobiography as big as life; Bildungsroman as immersive experience.

Patrician depite the pooch: Adam Mars-Jones

Adam Mars-Jones: When the dam breaks

Jaspers Rees
5 April 2008

Adam Mars-Jones – a Granta best young novelist, twice, before publishing his first slim novel – tells Jasper Rees how he came to start on an epic trilogy

Review

Triage by Claudia Rankine review – how should we respond to the world’s atrocities?

The American poet and essayist weaves memoir, fiction, criticism and lyrical lament into a tale of friendship in an age of existential crisis

Sarah Crown

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental,” writes the multi-award winning Jamaican-American poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine in the disclaimer to her latest work. “Unless it isn’t.” The pretzel-logic of this statement, its assertive ambiguity, sets the tone for a book that digs directly into the question of what we are to do with the idea of truth, when the world we live in is asking us “to hold, visually and emotionally, realities we do not yet have a viable system of language for”. In Triage, Rankine borrows from her personal history and from a world whose landscape now encompasses “the rise of fascism, the implementation through deportations of the Great Replacement theory, the starvation of devastated populations subjected to war and climate change”, and uses the material she gathers to pose a simple question. When faced with realities such as these, what do you do? Do you stand, or do you fall?

Peter Nadas, Author of ‘the Greatest Novel Written in Our Time,’ Dies at 83

Peter Nadas

Peter Nadas, Author of ‘the Greatest Novel Written in Our Time,’ Dies at 83

Susan Sontag gave that high praise to “A Book of Memories,” a labyrinthine chronicle of life under Communism.

Alex Marshal
27 Agust 2026

Peter Nadas, a Hungarian author who was best known for “A Book of Memories” (1986), a labyrinthine chronicle of life under Communism, and who was often discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Wednesday at his home in Gombosszeg, Hungary. He was 83.

Lives Crisscross Through Tumult in Hungary / Stories by Peter Nadas

Lives Crisscross Through Tumult in Hungary

By Adam Langer
Dec. 4, 2011

The physical copy of Peter Nadas’s “Parallel Stories” does not hold up well to a particularly aggressive reading. In at least one reader’s experience, cracking the book’s spine to make the 1,133-page tome into a more manageable bedtime read caused pages to break loose from their binding; by novel’s end piles of disordered pages were scattered every which way. 

Péter Nádas by Davis Kovacs

Péter Nádas
Photo by Miriam Berkley.

Interview

Péter Nádas 

by Davis Kovacs

JULY 1, 2007

Péter Nádas is Hungary’s leading contemporary writer. A scholar not only of literature, but of culture, horticulture, and above all the human body and its communications, Nádas presents a picture of temperament and elegance in the great tradition of the European intellectual. He has often been compared, perhaps syntactically, to the high realists Robert Musil and Marcel Proust. Susan Sontag, one of Nádas’s earliest and most vocal champions, compares his plays to the “encounter-dramas of Pina Bausch” and the “declamatory plays of Thomas Bernhard.” I myself see him, in many ways, as the Thomas Mann of our times. 

From author to anime hero / The unlikely revival of a Japanese literary star

Osamu Dazai
Ilustración de Triunfo Arciniegas

From author to anime hero: the unlikely revival of a Japanese literary star

This article is more than 1 month old

More than seven decades after they were first released, the dark novels of Osamu Dazai have become a publishing sensation, as a new generation of readers engage with his bleakness, humour and brilliance

 

Osamu Dazai│Photo by Tadahiko Hayashi

Osamu Dazai and the Art of the Slow Collapse

There’s something eerie about reading Osamu Dazai today. Not because of his death, though drowning in a canal with your lover does linger. Not because of his depression, though it claws through every line. But because Dazai, dead since 1948, feels like he’s writing from inside your head. Even now.

 

From cover design to shelf placement and influencer partnerships … how publishers will persuade you to buy their books this autumn

How to make a bestseller: insiders reveal the tricks of the book trade

John Self
Saturday 29 Augusto 2027

Think about the last book you bought. How did you choose it? Was it from a recommendation, a review, a TikTok video? Did the cover grab you, were you swayed by the quotes on the front, or did you just happen to spot it on an appealing table as you walked into the shop? Did you think about all the nudges that led you to that decision – by the publisher, the bookseller or that person you follow on Insta?

The best recent translated fiction / Pirkko Saisio, Wolf Hass, Alejandra Kamiya, Lucia Odoom

 

A sense of the ridiculous and the serious … Pirkko Saisio.

Translated fiction roundup 

Review

The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio; Short Circuit by Wolf Haas; Cosmos by Lucia Odoom; The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest by Alejandra Kamiya

John Self

Friday 21 Augusto 2026

The Red Book of Farewells by Pirkko Saisio, translated by Mia Spangenberg, Penguin International Writers (£14.99)
Following Lowest Common Denominator and Backlight, this book completes Finnish author Saisio’s autofictional trilogy. It covers her young adulthood in the 1970s, where she comes out as lesbian (“The electricity doesn’t go out. The Richter scale remains still”) and falls in love. One of her lovers, Havva, is a communist who’s engaged to a man; she relies on his rich parents for funding, but pees in their private pool as a protest. Later, Saisio is voted vice-president of a political drama company, as “she has the skills to bring about the revolution, specifically via theatre” – despite half-baked productions such as the “napalm opera” Vietnam-a-Go-Go. As that suggests, this is a story with a sense of both the ridiculous and the serious. Told in clear prose, it playfully shifts between third and first person as Saisio recounts her memories then analyses them. This enchanting series deserves to become a modern classic.