“Y/N is simultaneously a love letter to self-insert fanfiction and a delirious, philosophical romp through the annals of the modern day entertainment industry.” —Lisa Zhuang, Electric Literature

“[Y/N is] winningly weird and doesn’t waste your time, which makes it better than most new novels, just right off the top.” —Phil Christman, author of How to Be Normal

“[A] clever debut . . . a true novel of the era.” —Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle

“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.” —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

“Y/N is an utterly brilliant, shining, and mesmerizing debut that will make you rethink everything you know about fandom, celebrity, and parasocial relationships.” —Tamara Fuentes, Cosmopolitan

“Esther Yi’s Y/N is the most adroit depiction of celebrity and parasocial relationships I have ever read. Bizarre, confidently so, yet observant and abounding in humanity and humor, every sentence is a surprise. Our nameless protagonist’s journey through the looking glass of K-pop fandom will have you thinking deeply about what it means to live and to love in our profoundly online age.” —Tochi Onyebuchi, NPR

“A strange tale in the best kind of way… Reality and fiction blend together in a surreal examination of parasocial relationships and a treatise on fanfiction’s role as a distinctly artistic literary form.” —Chicago Public Library

“A hilarious and incisive narrative about the strength of fandoms and the consequences of fame in the age of the internet.” —Annabel Gutterman, Time

“This is a curious, cerebral work, shot through with moments of tender poetry and a vertiginous self-awareness.” —Nina Allan, The Guardian

“My definition of an unputdownable book . . . witty, astute, and self-aware.”
—Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed, in The Guardian

“This book is so good it’s hard to believe it’s a debut novel…Take what you think about boy bands and dial it up to 11. For the first half I was laughing to myself, writing haha in the margins, and I noticed at a certain point I had stopped laughing because I was thinking so deeply…It is short but so deep, so meticulously crafted. After I finished it I wanted to start over.” —MJ Franklin on the NYTBR Podcast

“Yi’s comic style is an archaic, many-layered thing . . . You start to suspect that, far from being a snarky satire of fandom, her novel may be lampooning the pretensions of literary fiction . . . Unlike the formulaic pop material she animates here, Yi has fashioned a novel that is witty, self-knowing, and, extraordinarily, far beyond categorization.” —Robert Collins, The Times (UK)

“Rather than a warning about the emptiness of people who get swept up in passionate celebrity crushes, this is a much stranger story—a narrative about a deliberate attempt to follow a fantasy in the full knowledge that it is a fantasy. . . . Y/N reads like a Paul Auster novel.” —Las Vegas Review of Books

[A] wondrous and strange first novel… Y/N resists the junkiness of the internet… against which a well-formed novel like this counteracts, a blast of cleansing heat. —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times

Y/N is a funny and deeply original meditation on love, devotion, and spirituality, and one need not be familiar with the world of K-pop fandoms to enjoy Yi’s brilliant prose. . . Y/N is a book that demands to be read and reread. — Angela Hui, 48hills

[In Y/N,] love and obsession are at odds, placed against a backdrop of an intense K-pop fandom, a balance Yi strikes flawlessly . . . With Yi’s clean prose, it’s easy to see the slippery slope from fan to obsessive adorer at the expense of self. — Hannah Ryder, West Trade Review

Y/N is frighteningly, coolly adept at vivisecting experiences of fandom obsession without suggesting it is above them . . . Luxuriously indecipherable . . . Y/N’s aphoristic surface is precarious, flexible, never going so far as to yield the pleasure of making sense. Rather, it dressed me down; sliced me open to reveal the clean emptiness of a floating, futile state of existence. — Trisha Low, Tor.com

[A] stunning debut . . . Strange, haunting, and undeniably beautiful, [Y/N] shines. —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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

Perhaps never before has there been a book I had to read more. I love literary fiction. I love ‘sad girl’ literary fiction especially. I love fan culture. I love kpop. I think I love this book . . . Esther Yi writes sentences the way I like to read sentences: clipped, pointed, acerbic, honest, and delightfully funny. Y/N captivated me. It’s an absurd and surreal exploration of the transcendent rise that comes with singular obsession and identity-through-devotion alongside the uneasy and uncomfortable fall that follows. —Sarah R., Bookseller at Powell’s

Yi . . . has earned comparisons to Elif Batuman, Thomas Pynchon, Yoko Tawada, and Marie NDiaye. —The Millions

[A] clever debut . . . a true novel of the era. — Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle

[An] engrossing and destabilizing riff on fandom and mass media. — Celia Mattison, Vulture

Bold, audacious, and stylish, Esther Yi is a marvelous writer who reminds me of Yoko Tawada and Marie NDiaye. Esther Yi takes our contemporary human culture, dismantles it, and makes it into something new. The clarity of her absurd vision is singular and important. —Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

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

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

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

It’s an astonishing debut. Unlike anything I’ve ever read before. I certainly loved the voice right from the off, and laughed out loud with delight at several sentences. I adore both the bonkerness of it and the novel’s deep seriousness, more Kafka than magic realism, but with more humour, perhaps more like Lewis Carroll in that the author conjures up an entirely plausible parallel reality. — Christopher Potter, Editorial Director Europa Editions UK

Bold, audacious, and stylish, Esther Yi is a marvelous writer who reminds me of Yoko Tawada and Marie NDiaye. Esther Yi takes our contemporary human culture, dismantles it, and makes it into something new. The clarity of her absurd vision is singular and important. — Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

Y/N is an utterly brilliant, shining, and mesmerizing debut that will make you rethink everything you know about fandom, celebrity, and parasocial relationships. — Tamara Fuentes, Cosmopolitan

Esther Yi’s debut Y/N plunges her protagonist and the reader into the absurd world of intense fandom. Yi explores parasocial relationships and the phenomenon of celebrity culture through her narrator, whose life changes when she instantly falls for a K-pop idol, Moon, at a concert. Disaffected with her life in Berlin, the narrator follows Moon to South Korea, but the real world cannot live up to her imagined one, and the real-life Moon proves to be a disappointment compared to the one of her insert-yourself fanfic. A fast paced novel that addresses larger questions of what it means to be a fan and what the role of a fan is, Y/N is the perfect read for anyone who has ever spent extended time dwelling in the imagined world of their mind. — Meghana Kandlur, Bookseller at Open Books

Y/N is at its best when it doesn’t try to do too much . . . At times, the novel employs austerity in moments of description, reminiscent of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies. —Chase Melton, Harvard Crimson

What a wonderful journey Esther Yi took me on. Reading this book feels like following a fantasy that most people would hide deep within themselves rather than pursue . . . There is so much more to this book than the obsession with an idol from a K-Pop boyband. This is one of the more unique books to look out for in 2023! — WheretoKim Blog

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. — Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

[A] bracing and brilliant debut . . . [Y/N is] a funny, surreal, and rousing search for the unattainable that reaches beautiful heights of absurdity, paranoia, and existential panic. — Colin Winnette, Electric Lit

In her hypnotic debut novel, Y/N, Esther Yi shrewdly manages both to expose and celebrate the effects of South Korean pop-culture domination… Yi is an inventive writer, eschewing labels, genres and, most certainly, expectations.  —Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness

“[A] lyrical debut . . . Yi’s novel takes on a surreal, almost hallucinatory atmosphere that blurs the line between what is real and what is imagined. Performed by Korean American narrator Greta Jung, this audio becomes more immersive as listeners delve ever deeper into the unnamed narrator’s dreams, imaginings, and longings.” —Enica Davis, Library Journal

“[A] refreshingly quirky debut novel.” —Mia Levitin, Times Literary Supplement

“Reading Y/N is an exercise in drowning: the farther you get into the book, the stranger that it becomes.” —Annelie Hyatt, Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism

“Reading Y/N is akin to falling down a dark corner of the internet or letting imagination run wild . . . The final result is a dreamy and impenetrable smokescreen of a novel . . . razor-sharp writing.” —Mahika Dhar, Asian Review of Books

“Surreal and stylish… That Yi navigates such weirdness with stylized precision and authorial purpose is a testament to her profound talent. This is a short book, but undeniably significant, a destined-to-be-classic.” —Miles Doyle, Commonweal

For readers of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, Either/Or by Elif Batuman, and The Emissary by Yoko Tawada

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 boyband, 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. An escalating series of mistranslations and misidentifications lands 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.