Items related to The Vagrants
The much-anticipated first novel from the prize-winning Chinese writer, acclaimed in the Guardian by Michel Faber as having `the talent, the vision and the respect for life`s insoluble mysteries to be a truly fine writer.` In the provincial town of Muddy Waters in China, a young woman named Gu Shan is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twenty-eight years old and has already spent ten years in prison. The citizens stage a protest after her death and, over the following six weeks, the town goes through uncertainty, hope, and fear until eventually the rebellion is brutally suppressed. Sumei, a mother of a young child, is sentenced to death as an anti-Communist activist. They are all taken on a painful journey; from one young woman`s death to another. We follow the pain of Gu Shan`s parents, the hope and fear of the leaders of the protest and their families. Even those who seem unconnected to the tragedy -- an eleven-year-old boy seeking fame and glory, a nineteen-year-old village idiot in love with a young and deformed girl, and old couple making a living by scavenging the town`s garbage cans -- are caught up in remorseless turn of events.Yiyun Li`s novel is based on the true story which took place in China in 1979.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
Amazon Best of the Month, February 2009">Amazon Best of the Month, February 2009: During the Cultural Revolution countless unspeakable acts went down in the otherwise unremarkable industrial town of Muddy River. Lovers betrayed lovers, children denounced their parents, and neighbors became sworn enemies. A few years later, the townspeople have convened at the public stadium to witness the execution of Gu Shan. A Red Guard leader in her youth, she has received the death penalty for her counterrevolutionary writings and unrepentant attitude. In Yiyun Li's startling debut novel, The Vagrants, we are introduced to Gu's parents, neighbors, and a handful of Muddy River's social outcasts whose lives have been irrevocably affected by her life and death. Yiyun Li's unblinking and unpredictable fictional narrative demonstrates how corruption and cruelty, fear, and moral ambiguity at the level of the individual reflect the dehumanization of an entire society. The Vagrants establishes Li as an important new voice in American fiction. --Lauren Nemroff
About the Author:
Yiyun Li is a winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. She 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. The author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Li was selected for a Whiting Writers’ Award and was named by Granta as one of best young American novelists under thirty-five. Li teaches at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherFourth Estate
- Publication date2009
- ISBN 10 0007299095
- ISBN 13 9780007299096
- BindingPaperback
- Rating
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want