Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories
    Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories
    Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories
    Audiobook7 hours

    Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories

    Written by Yiyun Li

    Narrated by Angela Lin, James Yaegashi, Jackie Chung and Jennifer Ikeda

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Author Yiyun Li, honored as one of Granta's 21 Best Young American Novelists under age 35, continues her illustrious career with this insightful collection of short stories. With compelling visions of the scrapes and unpleasant situations in which people find themselves, Li's works trigger emotional responses of all types-whether through a tale of unrequited love, an unburdening of guilt, or something else entirely. These heartrending stories are certain to strike a chord with listeners as they recognize aspects of their own lives.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 14, 2010
    ISBN9781449808778
    Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories
    Author

    Yiyun Li

    Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also 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.

    More audiobooks from Yiyun Li

    Related to Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

    Related audiobooks

    Short Stories For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

    4/5

    94 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Short stories about lonely people. A bit depressing.
    • 4/5
      a bit depressing for this time of year but the writing is excellent and kept me in the book

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Finest short story collection of the year. Really stellar.
    • 3/5
      The short stories were sad stories which were very well written.
    • 5/5
      I almost put down this book after reading the first story, a long (81-page) and rather dry reminiscence of a woman's time in the Chinese army, spurred by the death notice of her company officer. It was salvaged by her parallel memories of a local professor who befriended her and introduced her to Dickens and Hardy and told her the truth about her own background, so, fortunately, I kept reading.Yiyun Li is a writer with a delicate touch and a poetic voice. The stories in this collection focus mainly on lonely people, forgotten people, people suffering devastating losses, people whose lives have been shaped more by tradition and government policy and fate than by their own needs and desires. They long for meaning: to do something significant, to marry someone to whom they will matter, to have children who will depend upon them and through whom they can live vicariously. A widow sets up a shop across from a prison, selling goods at high prices to visiting women and, in turn, listens to their stories, often offering assistance; but is it for them or more for herself? A twice-divorced woman in her fifties, now living alone in her family's childhood home, pursues the widowed neighbor on whom she once had a crush. A secretly gay son agrees to his aging mother's plans to marry him to her one-time favorite student, who has a secret of her own. An aging group of women become detectives spying on cheating spouses.If you are looking for the funny or uplifting, you won't find it here. But Li is clearly in touch with the human heart, and these stories have a depth and beauty that will resonate long after you finish reading them.
    • 3/5
      “‘The moment you admit someone into your heart you make yourself a fool,’ she said. ‘When you desire nothing, nothing will defeat you. Do you understand, Moyan?’”In this highly-acclaimed volume of short stories, Li examines what it is to be a girl in modern China; adoptive daughters, female soldiers, old spinsters and marriages of convenience all come under consideration in her spare prose, in her little vignettes which rarely touch on the plot and involve few men. Mostly, this is a collection of reflections on men’s and women’s different roles in life and how women deal with that difference.This has been very favourably reviewed by a number of bloggers (full list of those I’ve come across at the bottom of the review) but somehow the magic didn’t reach me. I found the recurring theme of how hard women have it in life wearing (although I don’t deny its truth, certainly in certain countries) and tired of the almost stereotypical women presented – there were a number of spinsters, tired and world-weary, a group of busybody investigating old hens, a woman acting on a teenage crush… had this been written by a man I would have flung it out the window in disgust.Li has a beautiful turn of phrase, I won’t dispute that:“Spring in Beijing was as brief as a young girl’s grief over a bad haircut”“She had always liked to talk about her own death as if it was an event to look forward to, her secret superstition being that death, like a man, would make itself conveniently unavailable once it knew it was desired.”“Hanfeng looked at Siyu’s face, detecting a familiar absentmindedness. His mother, too, asked him questions to which she seemed scarcely interested in knowing the answers. He wondered if this happened to women who lived by themselves.”but her characters were often unsympathetic: in the first story, the narrator is quite heartless about a funeral“It is a hassle to travel for a wedding, but more so for a funeral. One has to face strangers’ tears and, worse, one has to repeat words of condolence to irrelevant people.”while her mentor bluntly reveals that the girl is adopted“‘You do know that you are not your parents’ birth daughter, don’t you?’ She turned and faced me. ‘And you do know that no matter how nicely they treat you, they can’t do much for your education, don’t you?’”I am very much the odd one out in perceiving this collection to be less than remarkable; I suspect it is my inexperience with the short story format. I would expect this collection to appeal to fans of an sparser writing style (others have suggested Kazuo Ishiguro as a companion author and I wholeheartedly agree) and those interested in feminist literature.
    • 4/5
      I’ve been doing a lot of short story reading lately. I’ve become fairly familiar with them as a result, but I’ll tell you this – this collection was unlike anything I’ve read yet.Really, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl contains a novella and some short stories. The novella was interesting – but it was the latter stories that really hit me hard. The title story was the most poignant. In such a short span of pages, Yiyun Li establishes such a relationship between her reader and her characters that I found myself weeping with want and sorrow for them. Within the context of that short story so much unspoken background was clamoring for attention that I found it difficult to focus on the surface story without feeling the pain, tension, and longing between the lines.This is a collection of beautiful writing, intriguing stories and one that I count myself lucky to own. I highly suggest reading it – especially if you are a fan of short stories and are looking for something a little different to broaden your horizons.
    • 5/5
      As a rule I do not like short stories but I loved this collection. The settings were intriguing and the characters memorable. The understated language created a depressing atmosphere that was appropriate to the narrative.