Often when describing patterns, they are placed in one of two categories: organic or geometric. Organic designs are ones ...

In 2017, Yiyun Li’s 16-year-old son, Vincent, died by suicide. Nearly seven years later, his younger brother, James, then 19, also took his own life. With her second memoir, Li examines the ...

Next time you are touring your garden, walking on wooded trails, or exploring a beachside scenery, look for immaculate swirling patterns. These can be found in the center of a sunflower, a snail’s ...

Yiyun Li’s latest memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” begins with a careful analysis of a sentence often used to deliver news of death: “There is no good way to say this.” Li writes that these ...

When I heard what Yiyun Li’s new book, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” was about, my first thought was that I could never read it. The book was written in the aftermath of the suicide of her son James ...

“Call it a combination of keen attention and ‘a profound indifference’ (to borrow Camus’s words) or a combination of intense emotion and an equally intense apathy. The fact is, there is no word for ...

In “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” Yiyun Li writes from a terrain no one chooses to map. Her spare memoir confronts the suicide of her younger son James in 2024, six years and four months after her ...