Esther Yi

A Novel

"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.

A novel

“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.” —Rick Moody, author of Hotels of North America From the author of the acclaimed debut novel Y/N comes a daring collection of fiction about alienation, sex, and spiritual inquiry. The cityscape of To God is in decay. One won’t find any fancy flaneurs here. As for happiness? Out of the question. Instead, one encounters drifters with nowhere to go and nothing to do, boxers with dreams of making it big (they won’t), artists who never get a chance to make art, women who frighten the men they love, and children who are more adult than the adults. Nothing goes right for these people—but what does going right mean anyway? After all, in the world of To God, it’s the loser who wins, the faceless who expresses, the atheist who truly believes, and the geriatric who’s reborn . . . At the heart of To God is a formidable voice, a beam of light that cuts through the entire collection to rearrange and reincarnate the world wherever it falls. Navigating the daily vicissitudes of work, love, and ideology, this voice asks: How do I know myself, and how do I know others? What does it feel like to know at all? What if I believe in nothing? Then what makes me live? Responsive to and born out of absence, this voice experiments with presence: a body, a personality, a set of relationships. Absence fuels the imagination, a kind of unbridled prayer, and this ritual becomes a stairway that the reader is invited to ascend, armed with an ever intensifying question to God, until the entire material world recedes out of view—only to reappear with greater urgency than before, openly necrotic and broken, itself a plane of mystery we can never call home, and its stakes all the more real for it. At the atomic level of language, the infrastructural level of genre play, and the cosmic level of existential threat, Esther Yi’s vision radiates, illuminating the increasingly confused coordinates of contemporary life, its absurd contradictions, and our growing disconnectedness not only from each other but from our own selves.

To God

“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.” —Rick Moody, author of Hotels of North America

From the author of the acclaimed debut novel Y/N comes a daring collection of fiction about alienation, sex, and spiritual inquiry.

The cityscape of To God is in decay. One won’t find any fancy flaneurs here. As for happiness? Out of the question. Instead, one encounters drifters with nowhere to go and nothing to do, boxers with dreams of making it big (they won’t), artists who never get a chance to make art, women who frighten the men they love, and children who are more adult than the adults. Nothing goes right for these people—but what does going right mean anyway? After all, in the world of To God, it’s the loser who wins, the faceless who expresses, the atheist who truly believes, and the geriatric who’s reborn . . .

At the heart of To God is a formidable voice, a beam of light that cuts through the entire collection to rearrange and reincarnate the world wherever it falls. Navigating the daily vicissitudes of work, love, and ideology, this voice asks: How do I know myself, and how do I know others? What does it feel like to know at all? What if I believe in nothing? Then what makes me live? Responsive to and born out of absence, this voice experiments with presence: a body, a personality, a set of relationships. Absence fuels the imagination, a kind of unbridled prayer, and this ritual becomes a stairway that the reader is invited to ascend, armed with an ever intensifying question to God, until the entire material world recedes out of view—only to reappear with greater urgency than before, openly necrotic and broken, itself a plane of mystery we can never call home, and its stakes all the more real for it.

At the atomic level of language, the infrastructural level of genre play, and the cosmic level of existential threat, Esther Yi’s vision radiates, illuminating the increasingly confused coordinates of contemporary life, its absurd contradictions, and our growing disconnectedness not only from each other but from our own selves.


Le imprese di una giovane donna senza nome, Y/N, e di Moon, affascinante e misterioso membro di una boy band coreana incredibilmente popolare e il loro viaggio filosofico ed emozionante destinato a rinnovare e trasformare entrambi. «Un esordio straordinario... Strano, inquietante e innegabilmente bello, Y/N risplende». Publishers Weekly Con un esordio spiazzante e magnetico, Esther Yi guida il lettore in un viaggio insolito e altamente lirico nel mondo delle celebrità e della moltitudine dei loro fan. Per farlo usa un espediente destinato a diventare un classico della narrativa, vicino alla realtà aumentata: la completa immedesimazione e immersione nella protagonista della storia. Entrando nei panni della narratrice, Y/N, ai lettori e alle lettrici viene data la possibilità di avanzare verso la sua a tratti disperata, a tratti algida, ricerca dell’amore, lasciando il tempo di ragionare su opzioni e prospettive per poi verificare sulla pagina che la storia proceda come la si è immaginata. Tra Don Chisciotte e Thomas Pynchon, l’autrice e la voce narrante seducono il lettore per inchiodarlo al libro e desiderare contro ogni aspettativa che infine e per sempre l’amore trionfi.

Adam Nayman

Ellena Savage

Christine Smallwood

James Butler

Paul Cunningham

Mark Cousins

Peter Baxter

Justin Wolfers

Tod Wodicka

Gareth Evans

Aoko Matsuda

Dan Edwards

Asa Yoneda

Andrew Chan

Jordan Cronk

Vadim Rizov

Oscar Schwartz

Tomas Hachard

Molly Lukin

Chiara Marchini

Aurelia Guo

Dom Amerena

Monika Kalinauskait¿

Fireflies Issue #3 explores the films of French director Claire Denis and Chinese director Jia Zhangke. The issue discusses, dismantles, reinterprets and creatively plays with their cinema, through responses from critics, filmmakers, novelists, poets and visual artists.

Jia Zhangke

Fireflies #3

Esther Yi

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