Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories

Description: In this collection of stories, the author illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate.

Review Quotes: "Yiyun Li is a true storyteller. Great stories offer us the details of life on the riverbanks: birth, family, dinner, and love, all framing the powerful flow of terror, death, political change, the river itself. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is as grand an epic and as tenderly private as a reader could wish."
-Amy Bloom, author of Come to Me

"With great tenderness, tact, and humor, these stories open a world that is culturally remote from us, and at the same time as humanly intimate as if its people were our own family and their thoughts the thoughts that lie nearest our own hearts."
-Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead and Housekeeping

"This extraordinary collection reminds you just how big a short story can be. With wit, ruthlessness, and an understanding of human nature-its grand follies, private sorrows, and petty dreams-A Thousand Years of Good Prayers may remind you of Flannery O'Connor, though Li is an original. Read this book and marvel at a writer both at the height of her powers and at the start of a brilliant career."
-Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Giant's House