Esther Yi

"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

Kat Albanese

Strange how it was only when she lost her grip on the most quotidian facts, that she remembered the one thing she had spent her entire life trying to forget.

Helen 

If most people looked for someone to love, she, like a tax collector, looked for those who failed to love her and made them pay up.

“I don't know what to do with the rest of the day" I said. I go home, and then what. What do I do with all that time ahead of me. But there's also not enough time. For what, I don't know."

 "It's simple," Lise said. "You find the people you love and follow them to the ends of the earth. Nothing else matters.

Y/N quotes

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