Yiyun Li

What does it cost to chase genius? Yiyun Li joins us to discuss Music Against the Night, her thrillingly imagined saga of two musicians—coming of age oceans apart—who mature, study, travel, love, grieve, and above all, chase their ambitions across a continent in upheaval.

Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Wednesday’s Child; The Book of Goose; Must I Go; Where Reasons End; Kinder Than Solitude; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; The Vagrants; and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers—and the memoirs Things in Nature Merely Grow and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham–Campbell Prize, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.