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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li
"You know how, very occasionally in your life, there's a 'before and after' reading experience? Well, reading War and Peace with Tolstoy Together has been that for me-a milestone not just in reading but in living."-Michael Langan From the acclaimed author of Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, a book about the art of reading. In Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace, Yiyun Li invites you to travel with her through Tolstoy's novel-and with fellow readers around the world who joined her for an online book club and an epic journey during a pandemic year. "I've found that the more uncertain life is," Yiyun Li writes, "the more solidity and structure War and Peace provides." Tolstoy Together expands the epic novel into a rich conversation about literature and ways of reading, with contributions from Garth Greenwell, Elliott Holt, Carl Phillips, Tom Drury, Sara Majka, Alexandra Schwartz, and hundreds of fellow readers. Along with Yiyun Li's daily reading journal and a communal journal with readers' reflections-with commentary on craft and technique, historical context, and character studies, Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace includes a schedule and framework, providing a daily motivating companion for Tolstoy's novel and a reading practice for future books.
Book Details
- Publisher: Public Space
- Publish Date: Nov 7th, 2025
- Pages: 258
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.50in - 5.75in - 0.58in - 0.70lb
- EAN: 9798998556302
- Categories: • Essays• Russian & Soviet• Books & Reading
About the Author
Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, among other honors. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University. A Public Space is an independent nonprofit publisher of an eponymous award-winning literary, arts, and culture magazine, and A Public Space Books. Under the direction of founding editor Brigid Hughes since 2006, it has been our mission to seek out overlooked and unclassifiable work, and to publish writing from beyond established confines.
Praise for this book
Among the many pleasures of the #TolstoyTogether group, while life has often felt on pause (which has ups and downs to it) seeing how much we've read reminds me I've been traveling all along, and not alone.
-Carl Phillips A Public Space initiated a communal reading of Tolstoy's War and Peace under the aegis of the novelist Yiyun Li, with the intention of lifting spirits and establishing a common bond among lovers of good literature.
--Joyce Carol Oates, Wall Street Journal The brilliant novelist Yiyun Li has started a War and Peace book club online... at A Public Space. You read 12 pages a day of War and Peace in a whole community of readers. And the next thing you know, you have read the book and the pandemic is over and you have read War and Peace, which is terrific.
--Ann Patchett, the PBS Newshour "In just 85 days, Yiyun Li invites us into a liminal space full of prismatic explorations on love and grief and the actions that inspire both. More than just a wondrous study of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Tolstoy Together reflects our thoughts back to us; a reminder that even in isolation, the simple act of reading contains multitudes." --Kaitlynn Cassady, Seminary Co-op Bookstores
--The Week Tolstoy Together "embodies the common humanity... a paradoxically rich connection with strangers who are widely dispersed yet linked by their predicaments and imaginations.... Thousands of isolated souls are on the same page."
--Alix Christie, the Economist
Tolstoy Together presents and re-presents--in a wonderful economy of style--passages from War and Peace and deposits them next to tantalizing fragments of thought... a work that operates by echolocation: an entertaining miscellany of personal anecdotes, close reads, contextual clues, and trivia that reinforce and refute each other in playful turns.
-Carl Phillips A Public Space initiated a communal reading of Tolstoy's War and Peace under the aegis of the novelist Yiyun Li, with the intention of lifting spirits and establishing a common bond among lovers of good literature.
--Joyce Carol Oates, Wall Street Journal The brilliant novelist Yiyun Li has started a War and Peace book club online... at A Public Space. You read 12 pages a day of War and Peace in a whole community of readers. And the next thing you know, you have read the book and the pandemic is over and you have read War and Peace, which is terrific.
--Ann Patchett, the PBS Newshour "In just 85 days, Yiyun Li invites us into a liminal space full of prismatic explorations on love and grief and the actions that inspire both. More than just a wondrous study of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Tolstoy Together reflects our thoughts back to us; a reminder that even in isolation, the simple act of reading contains multitudes." --Kaitlynn Cassady, Seminary Co-op Bookstores
In March when the virus was getting officially out of control, it felt like the only things people were talking about here in NYC were the virus, uncertainty, and thanks to A Public Space's book club: Tolstoy. I recall it being one of the few joyful things about that terrible period of time--imagining so many people, shut away in their city apartments, all reading Tolstoy, alone yet together. Sometimes we read to escape and sometimes we read to remember. Tolstoy Together is a great way to bookend that initial escape by remembering it through this lens, and continuing to carry Tolstoy forward. --Rebecca Fitting, Greenlight Bookstore Tolstoy Together couldn't have come at a better moment. It already has a vibrant community of readers participating just two days into the read. The group additionally benefits from A Public Space's active and inviting Twitter presence (you don't need to be an English major, or even a regular reader, to feel welcomed), and if you aren't a big social media person you can still follow along with Li's wonderful musings on A Public Space's blog.
--The Week Tolstoy Together "embodies the common humanity... a paradoxically rich connection with strangers who are widely dispersed yet linked by their predicaments and imaginations.... Thousands of isolated souls are on the same page."
--Alix Christie, the Economist
Tolstoy Together presents and re-presents--in a wonderful economy of style--passages from War and Peace and deposits them next to tantalizing fragments of thought... a work that operates by echolocation: an entertaining miscellany of personal anecdotes, close reads, contextual clues, and trivia that reinforce and refute each other in playful turns.
--Rhoda Feng, The Smart Set