Discuss “Any Human Heart” by Yiyun Li

[We meet every Sunday when there's a new New Yorker.]

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, June 22, 2025 at 4 pm CDT/5 pm EDT, on Zoom, we will discuss this week’s New Yorker Fiction story from the issue dated June 23, 2025: “Any Human Heart” by Yiyun Li.

This is Li’s second New Yorker story, third New Yorker byline this year, and fourth within the last 12 months. We read “The Particles of Order” last August and “Techniques and Idiosyncrasies” in March. Two weeks after “Techniques and Idiosyncrasies”, her personal history, “The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons”, appeared. It was drawn from her newly-published memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow”.

Li was recently the subject of a center spread feature entitled ‘I Don’t Ever Want to Be Free of the Pain of Missing My Children’ in the New York Times Book review; the new memoir was reviewed in the same issue.

1. Read “Any Human Heart” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker's paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” on page audio app on the story page (50:12 at 1x speed). The author also reads the story at this link (52:08 with an intro).
3. The author interview, “Yiyun Li on Dispelling Innocence and Dissecting Pears” is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

"Yiyun Li (Chinese: 李翊雲 - Li Yiyun) (born November 4, 1972) is a Chinese-born writer and professor who has lived and worked in the United States since entering graduate school. She writes exclusively in English. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
...
"Li was born and raised in Beijing, China. Her mother was a teacher and her father worked as a nuclear physicist. In Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, Li recounts moments from her early life, including the abuse by her mother."

- from Wikipedia’s Yiyun Li page, footnote marks excised.