A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories

Enoumously enjoyable read. If you like short stories that will grip YOU, enthrall YOU, & "will you" back begging for more..... Creatively written in an intellectual frame. I so enjoyed Yiyun Li's written imaginary thoughts. So different than I think; yet "the same".

Warning: Begin reading "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" at the BEGINNING of a weekend. If you wait till Sunday afternoon, you may find yourself skipping work on Monday, because you can't put it down. Yiyun Lee is a gifted story teller and an artist of the written word. Each of the ten stories in this collection is a perfect jewel.

This is the best collection of short stories I've read in a long time! I love the style of writing---very straightforward but also with so much meaning in every paragraph. Lately it seems every piece of fiction I read is gimmacky in some way--constantly changing perspectives, flowery phrases--but this is real writing, about people in tough situations interacting, about generations relating, about sad memories, but always with a firm grasp of reality. By the first paragraph of each story I know the main characters! I think this author will go far, and I look forward to reading more by her.

I first found Ms. Li's short story, Immortality, in the Paris Review. She frames a story around a rural Chinese village's tradition of sending castrated young men (the euphemism she uses is "cleaned") to the imperial palace to serve as eunuchs. Fast forward to the Cultural Revolution, the story shifts focus to a young man with the likeness of the country's dictator (it can be inferred that she is speaking of Mao Tse-Tung). The surprise is how she weaves present with past to reveal stories of China. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is full of such beautifully rendered stories. In Princess of Nebraska, a Chinese man and a Mongolian woman traverse time and space in a quiet Michigan cafe while pondering their past relationship to the same man, Yang, a blithe narcissistic Beijing youth with a gift for singing Beijing opera. In Love in the Marketplace, an English teacher in a rural village ponders a promise broken by two of the most important people in her life - her childhood sweetheart and her best girlfriend. In story after story, the reader finds disappointment and a trail of hearts broken by modern life's adversities, lies, and unfulfilled dreams. The language of the book adds to an unadorned tone that is at once mercilessly unforgiving in description of human life and deeply sentimental and non-judgmental of the characters. Highly recommended!

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is Yiyun Li's highly acclaimed short story collection which won the inaugeral Frank O'Connor Short Story Award among others. If proof were ever needed that US MFA programmes don't necessarily churn out writing clones, Li amply provides it. (She attended the famous Iowa Writer's Workshop). Her writing is fresh, lyrical - yet at times deeply disturbing. The short stories did precisely what short stories should do: illuminate small lives in telling snapshots, walk around in your head long after the few pages that contained them are read, shake you up. It wasn't the best holiday reading - the collection made me feel weighted with melancholy for all the tangled lives Li depicts and the necessary makeshift compromises her characters are forced to make. I found it hard to snap out of the little worlds Li creates. Most of the stories take place in a rural and small town China struggling with economic change and the move to a more free-market econonomy. All human messiness is here. In Love in the Marketplace a schoolteacher obsessed with the film Casablanca, is the victim of a broken promise. A stranger who arrives in the market place offering to slash his arm with a knife for money is the only person who seems able to honour his word. Extra is a hugely compassionate story about a middle-aged woman made redundant from her garment factory job. There's no way Granny Lin can survive on her dwindling savings and she reluctantly accepts a marriage of convenience to a sick old man. When he dies, she takes a job as a cleaner in a private school where she befriends a lonely little boy as much a reject as she is. Through both encounters, her eyes are opened for the first time in her life to the possibility and nature of love. The Prince of Nebraska is the story of a complicated love triangle. Sasha, pregnant and on her way to an abortion clinic in Chicago seeks Boshen's help. Both of them are involved with the enigmatic Yang, a disgraced Chinese Opera singer. An unusual compromise is worked out between them for a love that does not fit neatly into the box of a conventional relationship. But my favourite story - simply because I've come across a story narrated in this way before - was Persimmons. The slaying of local government officials puts a whole village under the curse of drought. The truth of what actually happened emerges gradually. Li writes the story in the first-person plural ("we") voice, as the whole doomed village speaks in one voice. Would I recommend it? I'd say it was a must-read, especially if you enjoy short-fiction or write it yourself. It deserved all the awards it received and is the best book I've read so far this year.