Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

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'What a long way it is from one life to another. Yet why write if not for that distance?'

Written over two years while the author battled depression, in and out of hospital, Dear Friend is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Interweaving personal memoir with a wide-ranging celebration of writers and books, this is a journey of recovery through literature.

From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Kierkegaard and Larkin, Yiyun Li traces the themes that have preoccupied these writers and herself: time and transformation, presence and absence, the impulse to abandon life and the impulse to carry on. Drawing on personal experiences - her unstable mother, her time in the Chinese army - she constructs a beautiful, interior exploration of selfhood and what is required to choose life.

Reveals, gloriously, the companionship, intimacy, and insight that can come from obsession with the written word
LA Review of Books

About Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is the author of three novels, Where Reasons End, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude, and two short-story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, as well as the memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has won literary awards including the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was listed among Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists 2007. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of a Windham-Campbell Prize and a Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Details

Imprint: Penguin
Published: 23/02/2017
ISBN: 9780241978672
Length: 176 pages
Price: £1.99

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Ebook 2017

Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

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Reveals, gloriously, the companionship, intimacy, and insight that can come from obsession with the written word

Literature, the clash of public and private, human nature itself-these subjects and more are explored with remarkable subtlety and rare, limpid mental beauty. A must-read for anyone trying to stay sane in a world that might be perceived as insane

Weaving sharp literary criticism with a perceptive narrative about her life as an immigrant in America

An intimate memoir of darkest despair... A potent journey of depression that effectively testifies to unbearable pain and the consolation of literature

Quietly forceful, unrelenting... She unfolds an argument with the self, suspicious of the very concept , but not, ultimately, refuse its possibilities

Novelistic scenes, limpid prose, subtly moving emotion... Personal reminiscences [and] literary meditations... Li explores ruptures in time, the difficulty of writing autobiographical fiction, the pleasures of melodrama

Publisher's description. A luminous memoir from the award-winning author of The Vagrants and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is the record of a life lived with books and a richly affirming examination of what makes any life worth living.

Beautiful and profound... This book is a terribly beautiful gift to the reader

A remarkable account of literary life [from] an important and gifted writer... Her new book is a meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life

Extraordinary. A storyteller of the first order

About Yiyun Li

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