About this Event
Join us for an in-person event with Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li for the launch of her new book Things in Nature Merely Grow. Joining Yiyun in conversation is President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Mitzi Angel. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.
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ACCESSIBILITY:
Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.
ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by 5/6 to request.
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Pulitzer Prize finalist Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow is a remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance that considers the loss of Li’s son James. It is a book that weaves clarity of thought out of an unfathomable experience, a book that matters immensely.
“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged,” Li writes at the beginning of Things in Nature Merely Grow. “My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”
There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.
This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning, about something that has an afterwards or an endpoint. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow tells the truth about loss as best words can, and challenges us to live with a measure of Li’s rigor, grace, and understanding. It is a book that testifies to its author’s indomitable spirit.
Photo credit: Basso Cannarsa Agence Opale
Yiyun Li is one of our greatest living writers, the author of several 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—and 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, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Mitzi Angel is President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Previously, she was publisher of Faber and Faber in London. The authors she has worked with include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rachel Cusk, Garth Greenwell, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Yiyun Li, Édouard Louis, Paul Murray, Sally Rooney, and Amia Srinivasan. Forthcoming projects include books by Hilton Als, James Gleick, and Bryan Washington.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Strand Book Store, 828 Broadway, New York, United States
USD 13.61 to USD 32.18
