PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

Yiyun Li is the author of the 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, as well as the memoir 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.

Her memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize, and she's here to talk to us about her new novel, Music Against the Night.

Yiyun, welcome to the show.

She was first on the show eight years ago now to discuss her landmark poetry collection, Whereas, a book that has, much like Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Solmaz Sharif's Look, and Natalie Diaz's Postcolonial Love Poem, endured as a touchstone of 21st century poetry.

A finalist for the National Book Award, Whereas won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.

The judges for the latter cited it as follows: how not to write what has been omitted.

Quote, "I have often crouched in footnote or blazing in title.

Yes, the context is vital here.

It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.

All incredibly prestigious.

And then Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in 2019.