Description

“A woman falls for a K-pop star at a distance in this thoughtful romance for the online age.” THE GUARDIAN

It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boy band, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic-in which you, the reader, insert [Your/Name] and play out an intimate relationship with the unattainable star.

Then Moon suddenly retires, vanishing from the public eye. As Y/N flies from Berlin to Seoul to be with Moon, our narrator, too, journeys to Korea in search of the object of her love. There, an escalating series of mistranslations and misidentifications land her at the headquarters of the Kafkaesque entertainment company that manages the boyband until, at a secret location, together with Moon at last, art and real life approach their final convergence.

From a conspicuous new talent comes Y/N, a provocative literary debut about the universal longing for transcendence and the tragic struggle to assert one’s singular story amidst the amnesiac effects of globalization. Crackling with the intellectual sensitivity of Elif Batuman and the sinewy absurdism of Thomas Pynchon, Esther Yi’s prose unsettles the boundary between high and mass art, exploding our expectations of a novel about “identity” and offering in its place a sui generis picture of the loneliness that afflicts modern life.

Publisher Review

"Y/N is an utterly brilliant, shining, and mesmerizing debut that will make you rethink everything you know about fandom, celebrity, and parasocial relationships." * COSMOPOLITAN (A Best Book of 2023 so far) * "[A] clever debut... a true novel of the era." * ELLE (A Most Anticipated Book of 2023) * "[A] wondrous and strange first novel . . . Y/N resists the junkiness of the internet . . . the fanfics and the livestreams and endless comments. All that writing, that global 'content,' is now so ubiquitous, so endless, so cheap-ChatGPT, bonjour-it comes to seem like a toxic cloud, against which a well-formed novel like this counteracts, a blast of cleansing heat." * The New York Times * "This debut novel, a Kafkaesque fever dream about fandom and obsession, arrives right on time... Haunting yet playful, immersive yet unreal, Y/N is a brilliant dissection of consumption in all its forms-how we consume art, and how it consumes us." * Esquire (A Best Book of Winter 2023) * "When Esther Yi paints a picture, she does it with bright, bold brushstrokes..." * LiteraryHub (A Most Anticipated Book of 2023) * "A riveting and innovative tale about identity, fandom, and art." * TIME * "Sumptuous, precise, and full of pulsing, startling life, Yi captures with finesse the rhythms of internet voyeurism, the corporeality of parasocial desire, and the very heartbeat of contemporary longing." * Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun * "A truly luminous book which shines its light on the strangeness of the lives of human beings in the internet age. It asks us questions - not only about social media and about celebrity but also about the very nature of the self - with a delicacy which masks its profundity." * Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork * "[A] piercing, feverish, and frequently astonishing debut." * Entertainment Weekly * "Yi . . . has earned comparisons to Elif Batuman, Thomas Pynchon, Yoko Tawada, and Marie NDiaye." * The Millions * "A surreal quest that seems tailor-made for the present moment... [Y/N is] a heady, immersive journey into musical fandom and cultural dislocation." * Kirkus Reviews * "Much mainstream writing about K-pop in the West . . . [is] chipperly respectable and pretty boring . . . In contrast to the standard narratives, Y/N is less interested in demystifying a cultural phenomenon by creating a legible justification for why someone becomes obsessed; it simply throws readers down the hole of obsession in all its fevered absurdity . . . Y/N is more freakish and hallucinatory than your average satire." * Vulture * "This is an exciting, probing, sharp new voice in international literature - one which applies a fine literary mind to pop culture phenomena and a refreshingly irreverent attitude to traditional literary themes of love, desire, fame and freedom." * Bidisha * "One of the most daring novels of the year." * Bookpage (starred review) * "Esther Yi's every paragraph is revelatory, unexpected, with an intense capacity to see the world anew, such that we are empowered again in the matter of astonishment. I admire her work so much." * Rick Moody, author of Hotels of North America * "Crisp zeitgeist setups within a transnational now-Esther Yi's sharp, sculpted paragraphs beat with a hilarious demonheart that'll make you cry. I loved it." * Eugene Lim, author of Search History * "Esther Yi's debut novel reads with decisive, alarming confidence, in a prose style that's both intellectually rigorous and playfully perverse. Yi has a preternatural sense for the ways we speak past each other, locked as we are in the whirlpools of our own devotion-Y/N reveals the unexpected places desire can lead us, if only we are willing to lose ourselves." * Larissa Pham, author of Pop Song * "The loneliness of the central character in Esther Yi's 'Y/N' is universal." * NPR *