Y/N by Esther Yi

Y/N by 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.

“In her funny, short, brilliantly oddball debut, the American novelist Esther Yi has found a fresh, electric way of saying “Screw you” to the marriage plot with a furiously clever tale of a female copywriter who becomes infatuated with a member of a Korean boy band…Unlike the formulaic pop material she animates here, Yi has fashioned a novel that is witty, self-knowing and, extraordinarily, far beyond categorisation.”

* The Sunday Times *

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

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781787704411
ISBN 10	1787704416
Title	Y/N
Author	Esther Yi
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Europa Editions (UK) Ltd
Year published	2023-06-08
Number of pages	196
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable