Born in November of 1972, Yiyun Li is a Chinese American writer who writes in English. After completing her graduation from Peking University in 1996, she moved to US and in 2000 earned her MS in immunology from University of Iowa. She took a turn towards creative writing by 2005 after completing her MFA degrees from the same university. Her short stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story. A couple of stories from her first story collection ‘A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’ have been adapted by director Wayne Wang in to films.
Her latest story collection Gold boy, Emerald Girl is what I wish to include in my TBR. As the blurb of book says, stories are set in 21st century China where economic development has led to new situations unknown to previous decades: residents in a shabby apartment building witnessing in awe the real estate boom; a local entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist sheltering women in trouble in her mansion; a group of retired women discovering fame late in their lives as private investigators specialising in extramarital affairs; a young woman setting up a blog to publicise the alleged affair of her father.
Knowing anything about Chinese people and the country at large is difficult for any outsider because of their two face policy. Though she believes that her Chineseness, her stripped-back style and intensity of creating fetalistic characters sets her apart from other western writers. She strongly believes that explaining China is not her job as we never expect American writer to represent America or British writer to represent Britain; writers like Yiyun Li comes to aid in understanding the China and Chinese society. Her books has been translated in dozens of languages though she has turned down all the offers of translating it into Mandarin as she thinks her country is “not ready” for what she has to say.
You can grab your copies from following links
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Fourth Estate (1 September 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0007303106
ISBN-13: 978-0007303106
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Random House (14 September 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400068134
ISBN-13: 978-1400068135
Adding this to the amazing bucket of blogs at #BlogchatterA2Z.
Xue Yiwei, A Chinese – Canadian storyteller born and brought up in Hunan Province of China. But after his graduation in Computer Science at Beijing University, he studied English literature in Université de Montréal. He has authored 16 books including four novels and five story collections. These books have received him a great appreciation from Chinese people. This wide readership had taken his short story collections and essays in critics’ Top 10 lists in Asia. He moved to Montréal as a safe heaven to write his heart’s content as he couldn’t do the same after getting turned down by publishers for his novel Dr. Bethune’s Children because the attitude of the novel’s expatriate narrator was judged as harmful to China’s reputation. Though this was not the first case as he was walking the thin line between unfettered self-expression and maintaining a readership in China since 1989 when he started his literary career.
The book I am putting up on this TBR list is a short story collection titled Shenzheners. This is translated into English by Darryl Sterk is about people from Shenzhen city. Shenzhen is the young city in Hong Cong which got declared as Special Economic Zone in 1980 as an experiment to introduce capitalism to Communist China. A city in which everyone is a newcomer, Shenzhen has grown astronomically to become a major metropolitan centre. Hailed as a Chinese Dubliners, the original collection was named one of the Most Influential Chinese Books of the Year in 2013, with most of the stories appearing in Best Chinese Stories.
Wells Tower is an American short story writer who is born Vancouver, British Colombia, Canada on 14th April 1973 and grew up in Chapel hills, North Carolina. He splits his time between Chapel Hills, North Carolina and Brooklyn, New York. He has been quietly writing his short stories and publishing them over a past decade in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Vice, Harper’s Magazine, A Public Space, Fence and other periodicals.
The blurb of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned says “In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.” With such strong praise and recommending, it is hard for me to ignore this book. This is the reason why I am including this book in my this A2Z short story TBR list.
V. S. Naipaul, Trinidad born, British – Indian author who is well known for his pessimistic novels set in developing countries and travel writings. In 2001, Naipaul was honored with Nobel Prize for literature “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”. Committee further added “Naipaul is a modern philosopher carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.” Even though he was not confident about his skills as a writer, which lead to his impulsive trip to Spain.
Though there is a chance to look this collection as a novel as it describes various characters and events living in one neighborhood through the eyes of a boy. But while publishing this book, the publisher André Deutsch hesitated over publishing short stories by an unknown Trinidadian writer, as Naipaul then was. Deutsch thought a novel would have more success and encouraged Naipaul to write one. Deutsch published the Miguel Street after Naipaul’s two novels got published. 
Born to reputed anthropologist couple Alfred Louis Kroeber and writer Theodora Kroeber, Ursula K. Le Guin is an American novelist who mostly crafted her stories in fantasy or science fiction genre. David Streitfeld of The New York Times praised her as “America’s greatest living science fiction writer” when Library of America honored her by publishing her work. Though she wrote science fiction or fantasy, her stories were always about being human. Her profound knowledge of anthropology is evident in her writing as she blends various human traits and creates her characters.
The book I am taking up for this TBR listing is “The Birthday of the World and Other Stories”. The book contains 8 stories out of which 7 are published previously. While reviewing this book on 
Tobias Wolff, An American author born in Alabama State is in his 70s. Writer, memoirist and novelist, he is most famous for This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army. Tobias has written stories which takes you to small-town America where joys, struggles despair and aspirations are equally small. The landscapes where Tobias sets his stories are so familiar that you just blend in them. Tobias was working at Syracuse University as an instructor in the graduate writing programme where Jay McInerney, George Saunders, William Tester, Alice Sebold and Paul Watkins were his students.
Wolff’s first short story collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, was published in 1981 the stories have reappeared in many anthologies. The collection I want to read titles as Our Story Begins which is the title of one of Wolff’s earlier short fiction published in 1985. In this collection, there are 21 of his best works and 10 new stories spanning three decades. These stories of war, morality, frustration, loneliness and love trace a path through the everyday and the extraordinary, shedding a poignant yet hopeful light on American life and the intricate truths of human nature. (From the blurb of the book)