Y/N. A Novel
Synopsis
Esther Yi’s surreal and dreamlike debut novel Y/N is perceptive about the strange forms of longing that characterize contemporary youth culture. — Veronica Clarke, First Things
Other reviewers have described Y/N as ‘Kafka-esque.’ Not having read Kafka, I don’t feel like I can use that term, but it gets bonkers. Like if you fed hallucinogenic mushrooms to the crush situation in The Idiot. — Fiona Warnick, The Rumpus
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.
Marketing Information
- Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize
- NPR interview with Esther Yi
- NPR Best Book of 2023
- Publishers Weekly Spring 2023 Literary Fiction: Top 10
- Vulture, “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023”
- Elle, A Most Anticipated Book of 2023
- Entertainment Weekly, A “Not to Miss” in 2023
- The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of 2023
- Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of 2023
- Goodreads, A Buzziest Debut Novel of the Year
- Publishers Lunch “Buzz Books” Highly Anticipated
- Cosmopolitan, The 15 Best Books of 2023 (So Far) You Should Pick Up on Your Next Bookstore Trip
- NYLON “March 2023’s Must-Read Book Releases”
- Electric Literature list “8 New Novels that Envision an Alternate Future”
- The Millions “March Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)”
- Publisher’s Weekly “PW Picks: Books of the Week, March 20, 2023”, in “20 new books to check out today!” from Literary Hub, in the Tertulia staff picks “12 New Books Coming in March”
- Great review in The Times (UK)
- Included on the Elle list of their favorite books of 2023 so far published on August 31, 2023
- Included in the Bookshop.org’s best books of 2023
- Included the Defector club selection in their “Afternoon Bites” on October 24, 2023
- Included in the New York Times Book Review: “100 Notable Books of 2023” and “The best books of 2023“
- Featured in the TIME: “The Best Books of 2023 So Far,” “The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023” and “The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2023“
- Selected by Alexandra Jacobs for the New York Times’ “Critics’ Picks: A Year in Reading“
- Recommended by actress and comedian Aparna Nancherla in her Wall Street Journal year in reading published on December 8, 2023
- Featured in the Temple University Press staff’s holiday gift book recommendations published on December 20, 2023
- Called by MJ Franklin his “book of the year” on the best books of 2023 episode of The Stacks, adding that it’s “one of those debuts that announces a brand-new voice that I hope we hear from for a very long time” available to stream on December 20, 2023
- Mentioned by Katy Waldman in her essay, “The Year of the Female Creep,” for the New Yorker published on December 29, 2023
- Ms. Magazine: “2023 ‘Best of the Rest’: Our Favorite Books of the Year!”
- Best of Korea: “Roundup of 2023’s Best Books by Korean Americans”
- Included on the DIY Mag 2024 reading list published on January 6, 2024
- A TIME top 10 Fiction Book of 2023
- Chicago Public Library Favorite Book of 2023
- A 2024 RUSA Notable Book
- Y/N by Esther Yi is featured in the New York Times Book Review’s Paperback Row!
- Mentioned by Nicolaia Rips in her piece about fanfiction in Hollywood for The Face
- Mentioned by designer Daniel Felstead in an interview for COEVAL Magazine
- Featured in a reading list in The Polytechnic, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s student newspaper
- Included on the Marie Claire list of the 14 best books for music lovers
- Mentioned by Mariah Stovall, author of I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both, on Biblio Lifestyle’s The Reader’s Couch podcast
- Featured in Kathleen Levitt’s piece, “Three New Novels That Change How You Think about Reality,” in Unwinnable, published July 1, 2024
- Included by James Folta in his piece, “What to read next, based on the texts you’re sending about the Olympics,” for Literary Hub, published August 1, 2024