Y/N: A novel

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Surreal, hilarious, and shrewdly poignant-a novel about a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a K-pop idol sends her to Seoul on a journey of literary self-destruction.

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 comesY/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.

Reviews

'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

'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

Author Bio

Esther Yi was born in Los Angeles in 1989 and currentlylives in Leipzig, Germany. Y/N is her debut novel.