Y/N is an utterly brilliant, shining, and mesmerizing debut that will make you rethink everything you know about fandom, celebrity, and parasocial relationships. * COSMOPOLITAN (A Best Book of 2023 so far) *
[A] clever debut... a true novel of the era. * ELLE (A Most Anticipated Book of 2023) *
[A] wondrous and strange first novel . . . Y/N resists the junkiness of the internet . . . the fanfics and the livestreams and endless comments. All that writing, that global 'content,' is now so ubiquitous, so endless, so cheap-ChatGPT, bonjour-it comes to seem like a toxic cloud, against which a well-formed novel like this counteracts, a blast of cleansing heat. * The New York Times *
This debut novel, a Kafkaesque fever dream about fandom and obsession, arrives right on time... Haunting yet playful, immersive yet unreal, Y/N is a brilliant dissection of consumption in all its forms-how we consume art, and how it consumes us. * Esquire (A Best Book of Winter 2023) *
When Esther Yi paints a picture, she does it with bright, bold brushstrokes... * LiteraryHub (A Most Anticipated Book of 2023) *
A riveting and innovative tale about identity, fandom, and art. * TIME *
Sumptuous, precise, and full of pulsing, startling life, Yi captures with finesse the rhythms of internet voyeurism, the corporeality of parasocial desire, and the very heartbeat of contemporary longing. * Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun *
A truly luminous book which shines its light on the strangeness of the lives of human beings in the internet age. It asks us questions - not only about social media and about celebrity but also about the very nature of the self - with a delicacy which masks its profundity. * Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork *
[A] piercing, feverish, and frequently astonishing debut. * Entertainment Weekly *
Yi . . . has earned comparisons to Elif Batuman, Thomas Pynchon, Yoko Tawada, and Marie NDiaye. * The Millions *
A surreal quest that seems tailor-made for the present moment... [Y/N is] a heady, immersive journey into musical fandom and cultural dislocation. * Kirkus Reviews *
Much mainstream writing about K-pop in the West . . . [is] chipperly respectable and pretty boring . . . In contrast to the standard narratives, Y/N is less interested in demystifying a cultural phenomenon by creating a legible justification for why someone becomes obsessed; it simply throws readers down the hole of obsession in all its fevered absurdity . . . Y/N is more freakish and hallucinatory than your average satire. * Vulture *
This is an exciting, probing, sharp new voice in international literature - one which applies a fine literary mind to pop culture phenomena and a refreshingly irreverent attitude to traditional literary themes of love, desire, fame and freedom. * Bidisha *
One of the most daring novels of the year. * Bookpage (starred review) *
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. I admire her work so much. * Rick Moody, author of Hotels of North America *
Crisp zeitgeist setups within a transnational now-Esther Yi's sharp, sculpted paragraphs beat with a hilarious demonheart that'll make you cry. I loved it. * Eugene Lim, author of Search History *
Esther Yi's debut novel reads with decisive, alarming confidence, in a prose style that's both intellectually rigorous and playfully perverse. Yi has a preternatural sense for the ways we speak past each other, locked as we are in the whirlpools of our own devotion-Y/N reveals the unexpected places desire can lead us, if only we are willing to lose ourselves. * Larissa Pham, author of Pop Song *
The loneliness of the central character in Esther Yi's 'Y/N' is universal. * NPR *