A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (20 page)

YIYUN LI grew up in Beijing and attended Peking University. She came to the United States in 1996 to study medicine and started writing two years later. After receiving a master’s degree in immunology from the University of Iowa, she attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received an MFA. Her fiction and essays have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Paris
Review, Prospect, The Best American Short Stories
and elsewhere. She won
The Paris Review
’s Plimpton Prize for new writers. Her debut collection,
A Thousand
Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story award and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award for a distinguished first book of fiction. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 2005 by Yiyun Li

Reading group guide copyright © 2006 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

“Immortality” and “Persimmons” were originally published in
The Paris Review
, in the Fall 2003 and Fall 2004 issues, respectively.

“Extra” was originally published in
The New Yorker
,
in the December 22 & 29, 2003, issue.

“The Princess of Nebraska” was originally published in
Ploughshares
, in the Winter 2004 issue.

“Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way,” was originally
published in
Glimmer Train
, in the Spring 2005 issue.

“After a Life” was originally published in
Prospect
,
in the April 2005 issue.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Li, Yiyun.
A thousand years of good prayers / by Yiyun Li.
p. cm.

I. Title.
PL2946.Y59T46 2005
813’.6—dc22 2004062891

www.thereaderscircle.com

www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-43051-9

v3.0