
Things in Nature Merely Grow
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Narrated by:
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Suzanne Toren
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By:
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Yiyun Li
About this listen
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.
“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this audiobook.
“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”
There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.
This is a book for James, but it is not an audiobook about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2025 Yiyun Li (P)2025 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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“In this intimate memoir, novelist Li remembers her teenage sons, James and Vincent, after their deaths by suicide . . . Li recounts both boys’ lives with palpable love and paints complex, distinct portraits of each . . . Readers who’ve dealt with their own tragedies will find comfort and understanding here.”—Publishers Weekly
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- Friends, Trends, and Dividends
- By: Kiley Reid, Jia Tolentino, Emma Cline, and others
- Narrated by: Arden Cho, Kelly Marie Tran, Helen Hunt, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Inequality. Influence. Fraud. Sabotage. These are the themes of great fiction and our modern economy. In this collection of short stories by some of today’s most scintillating writers, the rich get poorer and the poor get richer. Yeah, right! From the heartbreaking to the hilarious, here are eight instantly classic battles over currency, class, privilege - and social distance.
By: Kiley Reid, and others
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Kinder Than Solitude
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Angela Lin
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious “accident” in which a friend of theirs was poisoned. Grown up, the three friends are separated by distance and personal estrangement. Moran and Ruyu live in the United States, Boyang in China; all three are haunted by what really happened in their youth, and by doubt about themselves. In California, Ruyu helps a local woman care for her family and home, and avoids entanglements, as she has done all her life. In Wisconsin, Moran visits her ex-husband, whose kindness once overcame her flight into solitude
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Uninteresting, unsympathetic characters
- By Maureen McDaniel on 05-13-14
By: Yiyun Li
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A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
- Stories
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.
By: Yiyun Li
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Heart, Be at Peace
- A Novel
- By: Donal Ryan
- Narrated by: Anne Marie Ryan, Ciaran O'Brien, Donal Ryan, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of the most acclaimed Irish writers today, a new novel about smalltown Ireland that explores a community on the mend and the power of love and trauma to both bring people together and divide them
By: Donal Ryan
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Must I Go
- A Novel
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Jane Alexander, Alex McKenna, John Rubinstein
- Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of 17 grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past.
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Digging into an unknown world to her to further understand her daughter.
- By Julie on 08-01-20
By: Yiyun Li
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Major Arcana
- By: John Pistelli
- Narrated by: Nick Mills
- Length: 18 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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It begins with a gunshot: a student's public suicide on a university campus. The blast radius of this tragic explosion expands to encompass 50 years of our history and two of the grandest characters in recent American fiction: Simon Magnus, a comic-book writer who transfigured popular culture turned gender activist who transfigures the English language, and Ash del Greco, an online occultist who by the age of 20 has seen to the end of everything and wants desperately to prove the superiority of mind over matter.
By: John Pistelli
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Put Your Past in the Past
- Why You May Be Reenacting Your Trauma, and How to Stop
- By: Beverly Engel
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Millions of us are desperately trying to rewrite our past by unconsciously repeating it—unknowingly reenacting the traumatic events in our lives in an effort to complete unfinished business or undo what was done to us. These unconscious efforts to undo trauma only bring more pain, more disappointment, and more psychological damage. In Put Your Past in the Past, renowned psychotherapist Beverly Engel offers the first accessible and comprehensive book on emotional reenactments.
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Great book
- By Hidalgo on 04-04-25
By: Beverly Engel
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Hollywood High
- A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies
- By: Bruce Handy
- Narrated by: Alex Mortensen
- Length: 14 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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From a longtime Vanity Fair writer and editor, a delightfully entertaining, intelligent, and illuminating history and tribute to teen movies—from Rebel Without a Cause to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and on to John Hughes, Mean Girls, The Hunger Games, and more.
By: Bruce Handy
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Composting Our Karma
- Turning Confusion into Lessons for Awakening Our Innate Wisdom
- By: Barbara Rhodes
- Narrated by: Erin Humphrey Konuma
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Barbara Rhodes offers the Korean Zen teaching of don’t-know mind as an antidote to the overthinking, overly-stimulating modern world that is the cause of so much suffering. Rhodes shows us that there are ways we can work with, or “compost,” whatever we’ve got in front of us, digest it into energy that can get us through the rough times, and cultivate a satisfying life. And she offers fascinating insights from her professional life as a nurse, commitment to engaged Buddhism, life experience as a member of the LGBTQ community, use of psychedelics on her spiritual path, and more.
By: Barbara Rhodes
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Panic and Joy
- My Solo Path to Motherhood
- By: Emma Brockes
- Narrated by: Emma Brockes
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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When British journalist, memoirist, and New York-transplant Emma Brockes decides to become pregnant, she quickly realizes that, being single, 37, and in the early stages of a same-sex relationship, she's going to have to be untraditional about it. From the moment she decides to stop "futzing" around, have her eggs counted, and "get cracking"; through multiple rounds of IUI; to the births of her twins, which her girlfriend gamely documents with her iPhone and selfie stick, Brockes brings the listener every step of the way.
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It captured my emotion’s perfectly
- By ad 1981 on 02-22-25
By: Emma Brockes
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Your Deepest Ground
- A Guide to Embodied Spirituality
- By: John J. Prendergast PhD, Rick Hanson PhD -foreword by
- Narrated by: John J. Prendergast
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In John J. Prendergast's decades of experience as a psychotherapist and spiritual teacher, the area of the body that's most difficult for people to connect with, given our survival fear and trauma, is our physical and energetic ground. This area in the lower belly and at the base of the spine corresponds with the root chakra in the Indian subtle body tradition, the lower dan tien in Taoism, and the hara in Japanese martial arts.
By: John J. Prendergast PhD, and others
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Is a River Alive?
- By: Robert Macfarlane
- Narrated by: Robert Macfarlane
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law. Macfarlane takes listeners on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada.
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Love of language / Love of nature / Moral clarity
- By Michael McNulty on 05-21-25
Her deep and beautiful descriptions of sorrow
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Heartbreaking and Beautiful
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