Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
Yiyun Li · 2010
Stories of ordinary Chinese lives shaped by political upheaval. Li writes loneliness with the precision of a surgeon.
The case against
Li keeps one emotional thermostat setting, resigned loneliness, and the stories here never touch the dial. Her people accept solitude so completely that the stories stop dramatizing and start cataloguing; read together, they argue that endurance is the only plot. The restraint is the achievement and the ceiling. Take them one at a time.
Short Stories · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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