Yiyun Li (Chinese: 李翊雲; born November 4, 1972) is a Chinese-American writer. Her short stories and novels have won several awards and distinctions, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End. It brightened my day when I saw that this week's … It’s a postmodern Through the Looking Glass, with homages to the original throughout, both in overt references and a similar enthusiasm for wordplay—literally: playing with words. Where Reasons End imagines a dialogue between a mother and her teenage son after he has been lost to suicide. The profoundly sad premise might prove challenging for some but the rewards are spare, austere prose and a ‘realer than real’ read. At Li’s request, we agreed ahead of the interview not to talk about the details of her son’s death and to focus on Where Reasons End. Jiayu says little about her son’s death, but, as a way of grieving, she starts to keep a spreadsheet in which she lists all the people she’s known who have died and what she remembers of them. The novel Where Reasons End was written, as many people know by now, in the year after the suicide of the author’s sixteen-year-old son, Vincent Kean Li. In Yiyun Li’s novel Where Reasons End, an unnamed narrator converses with her teenage son, Nikolai, in the months following his death by suicide. "All Will Be Well" by Yiyun Li from the March 11, 2019 issue of The New Yorker Yiyun Li is one of my favorites. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. • Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li is published by Hamish Hamilton (£12.99). I n the summer and autumn of 2012, Yiyun Li, the award-winning Chinese-American fiction writer, twice tried to kill herself. To order a copy for £11.43 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Yiyun Li’s spare and haunting new novel, Where Reasons End, follows a mother who continues to communicate with her teenage son after he commits suicide by writing a story about “a world made up by words, and words only.No images, no sounds.” It’s a place “unspecified in time and space” where the mother and son can have a shared language that centers around questions. As Yiyun Li's The Vagrants demonstrates on every page, the China of 1979 — three years after the death of Mao — was very much a traditional China that venerable ancestors would have recognized — and that the ghosts of peasants might have regretted missing. Noting tonal and stylistic departures from her previous works, reviewers have praised it for reworking the novelistic form to accommodate the rhythms and temporalities of grief. Equally compact at less than 200 pages each, they take a good, long, hard stare at death … It asks questions about the comfort of cliché, about whether dumber is safer, about whether precision is worth the effort. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space. Two new titles — Yiyun Li’s novel “Where Reasons End” and Han Kang’s “The White Book” — are among the most inventive and thought-provoking books I’ve read on the subject. Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End is consumed by etymological explorations, puns, semantics. In the months after his death, Li began writing a new novel. Yiyun Li began writing her latest novel, “Where Reasons End,” in the months after her teenage son committed suicide in 2017. Author Yiyun Li.