Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

"Li is extraordinary, a storyteller of the first order. Each tale in this collection is as wild and beautiful and thorny as a heart. Li inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and compassion that one cannot help but marvel at her remarkable talents."-Junot Diaz

"This is work that lasts. Li's characters are held aloft and illuminated in her strong and magical prose."—Amy Bloom

"In the most dismal circumstances and with the most unlikely subjects, Yiyun Li has the rare ability to conjure hope. She writes with precision and delicacy about the Chinese diaspora and about the new China, and in doing so she writes about us all."-Mona Simpson

"A stellar assortment of stories...further proof that Li deserves to be considered among the best living fiction writers."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Brilliant...a frighteningly lucid vision of human fate."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Extraordinary...beautifully paced, exquisitely detailed...a spellbinding vision of the power of the human spirit."-Chicago Tribune

"[Li is] one of America's best young novelists."-Newsweek

"A remarkable debut...You find yourself reading one perfectly realized gem after the next. The Washington Post Book World

In These Spellbinding Stories, Yiyun Li, Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner and acclaimed author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants, gives us exquisite fiction filled with suspense, depth, and beauty, in which history, politics, and folklore magnificently illuminate the human condition.

In the title story, a professor introduces her middle-aged son to a favorite student, unaware of the student's true affections. In "A Man Like Him," a lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a man wrongly accused of an indiscretion. In "The Proprietress," a reporter from Shanghai travels to a small town to write an article about the local prison, only to discover a far more intriguing story involving a shopkeeper who offers refuge to the wives and children of inmates. In "House Fire," a young man who suspects his father of sleeping with the young man's wife seeks the help of a detective agency run by a group of feisty old women.

Written in lyrical prose and with stunning honesty, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl reveals worlds strange and familiar, and cultures both traditional and modern, to create a mesmerizing and vibrant landscape of life.

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons.