Yiyun Li on “The Try-Works”
From The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly by Lapham’s Quarterly
May 8, 2026 · 58 min
About this episode
Yiyun Li discusses the themes of wisdom, woe, and madness in relation to Melville's 'The Try-Works' from Moby Dick.
“‘There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness’—to me, that summarizes much of life,” says Yiyun Li on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “I don’t think many people would put those three words together in a sentence—wisdom, woe, and madness—as a sort of trinity. I mean, when I say that passage is a touchstone in my reading, I go back to this line and think about what I read, what I write, and what I experience in life. It’s always about these three words. And you cannot separate them in a very clear way.” This week, in a return of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, Donovan Hohn speaks with novelist and essayist Yiyun Li, author most recently of Things in Nature Merely Grow, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir, about “The Try-Works,” chapter 96 of Melville’s novel, in which Ishmael teaches readers how to render whale blubber, falls asleep at the Pequod ’s jawbone tiller, and, upon awakening, flies like a “Catskill eagle” into and out of the “blackest gorges” of the soul. The chapter’s closing paragraph is, to Li’s mind, possibly “the most gorgeous paragraph written.” Earlier conversations in our…
People in this episode
Host: Donovan Hohn
Guest: Yiyun Li
Topics covered
- wisdom
- woe
- madness
- Moby Dick
- literature
- whale blubber
- novel analysis
Keywords
- Yiyun Li
- Moby Dick
- The Try-Works
- literature
- whale blubber
- wisdom
- madness
- novel analysis
- Pulitzer Prize
- Donovan Hohn
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Moby Dick, Things in Nature Merely Grow
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