"A listless young woman becomes obsessed with a K-Pop star and uproots her life to find him on the other side of the world. I expected this to be a light, breezy read about fandom and young love; instead, it’s a cerebral meditation on artistry, individuation, and the nature of modern obsession. Through these two characters, Esther Yi explores the role that fans play in creating the stars they worship, even sublimating their own identities to their devotion. An academic treatise on this subject would be interesting enough, but Yi also happens to be a sharp and witty storyteller. As soon as the book begins, it’s clear that Y/N is itself a work of art, and every word is chosen with careful deliberation."
Publisher Astra Publishing House
Publication Date 2023-03-21
Section New Hardcover - Fiction
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781662601538
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 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. She stumbles into total disorientation. As Y/N flies from Berlin to Seoul to be with Moon, our narrator, too, journeys in search of the object of her love. In Korea, 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.
