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The New Yorker: Fiction

Yiyun Li Reads William Trevor

5/1/20251 hr 11 min

Yiyun Li joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Piano Tuner’s Wives,” by William Trevor, which was published in The New Yorker in 1995. Li has published eight books of fiction, including the novels “Must I Go” and “Book of Goose,” a winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the story collection “Wednesday’s Child,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. A new nonfiction work, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” will be published this month.

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Clips

Two lines hold everything
The weight of 'we'
Jealousy versus envy
Destroying his vision
He knows, and lets her
Does the living really win?
Quiet is more brutal
A sculptor’s precision
‘It was flawless’

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Speaker 00:00

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