Author Biography

HANYA YANAGIHARA lives in New York City.

Review

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Wall Street Journal • NPR • Vanity Fair • Vogue • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • O, The Oprah Magazine • Slate • Newsday • Buzzfeed • The Economist • Newsweek • People • Kansas City Star • Shelf Awareness • Time Out New York • Huffington Post • Book Riot • Refinery29 • Bookpage • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus

"Astonishing." —The Atlantic

"Deeply moving. . . . A wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship." —NPR
 
"Elemental, irreducible." —The New Yorker

"Hypnotic. . . . An intimate, operatic friendship between four men." —The Economist
 
 "Capacious and consuming. . . . Immersive." —The Boston Globe

"Beautiful." —Los Angeles Times

"Exquisite. . . . It's not hyperbole to call this novel a masterwork—if anything that word is simply just too little for it." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Remarkable. . . . An epic study of trauma and friendship written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured. . . . A Little Life announces [Yanagihara] as a major American novelist." —The Wall Street Journal

"Utterly gripping. Wonderfully romantic and sometimes harrowing, A Little Life kept me reading late into the night, night after night." —Edmund White

"Spellbinding . . . . An exquisitely written, complex triumph." —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
"Drawn in extraordinary detail by incantatory prose. . . . Affecting and transcendent." —The Washington Post

"[A Little Life] lands with a real sense of occasion: the arrival of a major new voice in fiction. . . . Yanagihara's achievement has less to do with size . . . than with the breadth and depth of its considerable power, which speaks not to the indomitability of the spirit, but to the fragility of the self." —Vogue

"Exquisite. . . . The book shifts from a generational portrait to something darker and more tender: an examination of the depths of human cruelty, counterbalanced by the restorative powers of friendship." —The New Yorker

"A book unlike any other. . . . A Little Life asks serious questions about humanism and euthanasia and psychiatry and any number of the partis pris of modern western life. . . . A devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch's, a few sizes larger." —The Guardian

"Exceedingly good." —Newsweek

"A Little Life is unlike anything else out there. Over the top, beyond the pale and quite simply unforgettable." —The Independent

"Piercing. . . . [Yanagihara is] an author with the talent to interrogate the basest and most beautiful extremes of human behaviour with sustained, bruising intensity." —The Times Literary Supplement

"A brave novel. . . . Impressive and moving." —Literary Review

"Enthralling and completely immersive. . . . Stunning." —Daily News

Review Quote

Praise for A Little Life : "Yanagihara''s immense new book, A Little Life ,

Excerpt from Book

1 The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking. Willem held up a hand in greeting to him, but the man didn''t wave back. In the bedroom, Jude was accordioning the closet door, opening and shutting it, when Willem came in. "There''s only one closet," he said. "That''s okay," Willem said. "I have nothing to put in it anyway." "Neither do I." They smiled at each other. The agent from the building wandered in after them. "We''ll take it," Jude told her. But back at the agent''s office, they were told they couldn''t rent the apartment after all. "Why not?" Jude asked her. "You don''t make enough to cover six months'' rent, and you don''t have anything in savings," said the agent, suddenly terse. She had checked their credit and their bank accounts and had at last realized that there was something amiss about two men in their twenties who were not a couple and yet were trying to rent a one-bedroom apartment on a dull (but still expensive) stretch of Twenty-fifth Street. "Do you have anyone who can sign on as your guarantor? A boss? Parents?" "Our parents are dead," said Willem, swiftly. The agent sighed. "Then I suggest you lower your expectations. No one who manages a well-run building is going to rent to candidates with your financial profile." And then she stood, with an air of finality, and looked pointedly at the door. When they told JB and Malcolm this, however, they made it into a comedy: the apartment floor became tattooed with mouse droppings, the man across the way had almost exposed himself, the agent was upset because she had been flirting with Willem and he hadn''t reciprocated. "Who wants to live on Twenty-fifth and Second anyway," asked JB. They were at Pho Viet Huong in Chinatown, where they met twice a month for dinner. Pho Viet Huong wasn''t very good--the pho was curiously sugary, the lime juice was soapy, and at least one of them got sick after every meal--but they kept coming, both out of habit and necessity. You could get a bowl of soup or a sandwich at Pho Viet Huong for five dollars, or you could get an entr

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