Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose. “Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives. “After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations. These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.

Brilliant and original, ‘A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’ introduces a remarkable first collection of stories about China from an author set to become a major literary talent.

In Prayers for a Thousand Years, Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon have collected hundreds of wishes, blessings, stories, and challenges-almost all written especially for this volume-from a diverse group of distinguished international contributors. Spiritual teachers, poets and activists, political leaders, youth, artists and visionaries-all are joined together here for the first time, sharing their personal appeals for peace and understanding. Organized around eternal themes-such as creating communities of peace, reflections on politics, economics, and morality, and our holy earth-this book is a profound and lively collection of empowering visions for our common future and a celebration of the infinite variations of universal hope.

In these spellbinding stories, Yiyun Li, a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, and one of The New Yorker’s top 20 fiction writers under 40, gives us exquisite stories in which politics and folklore magnificently illuminate the human condition. A professor introduces her middle-aged son to a favorite student, unaware of the student’s true affections. A lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a man wrongly accused of an indiscretion. Six women establish a private investigating agency to battle extramarital affairs in Beijing. Written in lyrical prose and with stunning honesty, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl introduces us to worlds strange and familiar, creating a mesmerizing and vibrant landscape of life.

'Rock's own poems... show a winning empathy with children.' The Tablet Here is a timeless collection of prayers, dealing with every aspect of a child's life, faith, and delight in the world. Here you will find prayers from the Bible as well as from traditional and more modern anthologies. A great many have been specially written for this book. One section is devoted to prayers for babies and very young children. The others are more suitable for use with older children, whether for reading alone, at family prayers, in churches, or at school assemblies. The prayers are organized by theme and carefully indexed to make the book easy to use and a joy to browse. Since its first edition in 2003, this book has established itself as a trusted resource among all those who say prayers with children.

450+ Poems, Prayers, Hymns and Blessings This treasury of beautiful and powerful pieces is the perfect companion for marking holidays, milestones, and the seasons. You'll discover prayers to Janus from Horace and Ovid, a traditional Scottish blessing for Imbolc, an invocation to Pan by Aleister Crowley, an ode to Proserpine by Mary Shelley, a pharaoh's hymn to Isis, a song for Lammas by Gwydion Pendderwen, and many, many more. A tribute to the beauty and resiliency of Paganism, this sourcebook will enhance any special day throughout the year. Enjoy prayers for weddings and funerals, blessings for the sabbats, and hymns to the gods and goddesses of various pantheons. Barbara Nolan includes brief historical or biographical details to contextualize each piece as well as descriptions of different celebrations and festivals to help you integrate these readings into your practice. A Year of Pagan Prayer demonstrates that the literary worship of Pagan deities was never fully lost in the West. This bounteous collection draws from the spiritual legacy of Italian Renaissance poets, ancient Sumerian priestesses, twentieth-century Pagans, French Romantics, Greek playwrights, nineteenth-century British occultists, and Egyptian hymnists, making it a must-have resource for anyone who yearns to embody the eloquent expressions of our Pagan past.

In her first memoir, award-winning novelist Yiyun Li offers a journey of recovery through literature: a letter from a writer to like-minded readers. “A meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.”—Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead “What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?” Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a luminous account of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Yiyun Li grew up in China and has spent her adult life as an immigrant in a country not her own. She has been a scientist, an author, a mother, a daughter—and through it all she has been sustained by a profound connection with the writers and books she loves. From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Søren Kierkegaard and Philip Larkin, Dear Friend is a journey through the deepest themes that bind these writers together. Interweaving personal experiences with a wide-ranging homage to her most cherished literary influences, Yiyun Li confronts the two most essential questions of her identity: Why write? And why live? Praise for Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life “Li has stared in the face of much that is beautiful and ugly and treacherous and illuminating—and from her experience she has produced a nourishing exploration of the will to live willfully.”—The Washington Post “Li’s transformation into a writer . . . is nothing short of astonishing.’”—The New York Times Book Review “An arrestingly lucid, intellectually vital series of contemplations on art, identity, and depression.”—The Boston Globe “Li is an exemplary storyteller and this account of her journey back to equilibrium, assisted by her closest companion, literature, is as powerful as any of her award-winning fiction, with the dark fixture of her Beijing past at its centre.”—Financial Times “Every writer is a reader first, and Dear Friend is Li’s haunted, luminous love letter to the words that shaped her. . . . Her own prose is both lovely and opaque, fitfully illuminating a radiant landscape of the personal and profound.”—Entertainment Weekly “Yiyun Li’s prose is lean and intense, and her ideas about books and writing are wholly original.”—San Francisco Chronicle