Y/N: A Novel

For fans of Lauren Oyler and Elif Batuman, an unmissable debut novel about a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a member of a wildly popular K-pop band sends her to Seoul on a hilarious, high-concept journey of literary self-destruction.

It’s as if her life only truly began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the German boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away as she seeks him out in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, where fans comment in dozens of languages; even on the packaging of skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boyband, of which Moon is the youngest member. Bursting with untenable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing deranged fanfiction in which [Your/Name] has an intimate relationship with the unattainable star.
 
But when Moon falls gravely ill and vanishes from public view, she tumbles into total disorientation. As Y/N flies from Berlin to Seoul to be closer to Moon, our narrator, too, journeys back to the city where her parents were born, in search of the pop star. In Korea, an escalating series of unhinged circumstances land her at the headquarters of the Kafkaesque entertainment company that manages the boyband—where, in a turn of events befitting her wildest fanfiction, she lands herself a job. At a secret location, together with Moon at last, fantasy and real life approach their final convergence—as do she and Y/N—until she can no longer hide her obsession from Moon. 
 
Crackling with the mordant angst of Ottessa Moshfegh and the sinewy ingenuity of Thomas Pynchon, Esther Yi’s Y/N is an astonishing debut, a bravura performance of the modern absurd, and a thought-provoking warning against the utopian promises and dystopian leakages of pop culture.
show more