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Yiyun Li's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Yiyun Li recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Yiyun Li's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

1

Sakhalin Island

Anton Chekhov, Brian Reeve

4.2
The only edition in print of Chekhov's exposé of the Tsarist penal system, with many topical reverberations

In 1890, the 30-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous 11-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his t
Yiyun Li portrait Recommended by Yiyun Li.
Family Sayings book cover2

Family Sayings

Natalia Ginzburg

4.1
Hailed upon publication as a groundbreaking memoir, giving the form “a new dimension, new possibilities, and . . . an aspect that is entirely new” (Times Literary Supplement), Family Sayings is Natalia Ginzburg’s masterpiece and a classic of contemporary Italian literature. Although it asks to be read as fiction, the author, one of Italy’s finest twentieth-century writers, admits that it is highly
Ruth Ben-Ghiat portraitYiyun Li portrait Recommended by Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Yiyun Li.
Yiyun Li portrait
Yiyun Li

You don’t need the author to say ‘And I experienced it like this… and I was changed by this event and then that event’, because you feel it yourself in the way she writes. [source]

Ruth Ben-Ghiat portrait
Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Family Lexicon, which is more like a novelized memoir, is a valuable testimony of how private life unfolded during Fascist Italy. [source]

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life book cover3

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

C. S. Lewis

4.3
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life is a partial autobiography describing Lewis' conversion to Christianity. The book overall contains less detail concerning specific events than typical autobiographies. This is because his purpose in writing wasn't primarily historical. His aim was to identify & describe the events surrounding his accidental discovery of & consequent search for the pheno
Yiyun Li portrait Recommended by Yiyun Li.
4

Excursions in the Real World

William Trevor, Lucy Willis

4.3
A modern master of the short story brings his precise and compassionate observations to bear on his own life, in a book of recollections that is at once funny, poignant, and revealing. As William Trevor records his migration from the shabby-genteel precincts of Ireland's Protestant middle-class to the sleek vulgarity of London in the swinging sixties, from Cork and Dublin to New York and Isfahan,
Yiyun Li portrait Recommended by Yiyun Li.
Crabcakes: A Memoir book cover5

Crabcakes: A Memoir

James Alan McPherson

3.3
With the same grace and lyrical precision that distinguish his vibrant short stories, James McPherson surveys the emotional upheaval of his last twenty-one years. From Baltimore, Maryland, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Iowa and Japan, Crabcakes witnesses McPherson's confrontation with the past, and his struggle to make sense of it and to bind it, peacefully, to the present. His elliptical search
Yiyun Li portrait Recommended by Yiyun Li.