On Wednesday, May 20, from 6-7:30 p.m., the Cambridge Public Library will host Yiyun Li for a reading of her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow. This hybrid event is cosponsored by the Cambridge Public Library Foundation. Registration is required.
After a reading from her work, Yiyun will appear in conversation with Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction and the Restless Books Award for New Immigrant Writing.
In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Li reflects on the loss of her son James, not long after the loss of her son Vincent. The Pulitzer committee calls it, “a writer’s deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner, an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language and the persistence of life.”
In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, Things in Nature Merely Grow was a finalist for both the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award as well as the recipient of the prestigious Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
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