Y/N

Based on the title alone, I knew Yi’s debut novel would hit me like a crossbow to the heart. “Y/N” Is a prevalent shorthand for a particular kind of self-insert fan fiction, and having grown up in online fandom spaces, I have a lot of nostalgia for (and now plenty of necessary distance from) the passion that often explodes within and beyond those communities.

And still, I wasn’t prepared for the journey that Yi took me on. Nominally about one woman's spiraling obsession with a Korean pop idol, Y/N charts the inexplicable journey between a “regular person” and a “fan"… show more.

This book breaks all the rules because I’m still not certain that it wasn’t a fever dream. Fan culture, particularly K-pop fan culture, is usually depicted as cute and innocent and something for teenage girls. However, Y/N really flips that on its head and delves into the dark underbelly of fandom that includes obsession, stalking, and the break in reality that can happen due to heavy reliance on parasocial relationships.

This book was so immersive in the way it flipped between fanfiction, in which you’re meant to insert yourself into, and the wild journey that the unreliable narrator goes on.… show more.

Imagine if a Thomas Pynchon book got chopped and blended with a story of K-Pop fandom. That’s how I think of Y/N (Your Name). It’s a book excavating the shafts of our global moment of how we can be connected yet feel so alone, and how our connections are less social media but more tribes of fandom (where following the Grateful Dead was a niche thing, today, it seems to be the thing for those in their 20s.) 

The book gets into the head of a young Korean-American woman living in Berlin who finds meaning in “The Pack of Boys”… show more.

Look, this book isn’t for everyone. But it has been a long time since I’ve encountered a novel so weird, so incisive, and so unapologetically itself that I had to include it here.

The protagonist is an obsessive fan of one member of a K-pop boy band that is totally not based on BTS. She travels from Germany to South Korea to meet her obsession, Moon, all the while writing fanfiction featuring Moon and a protagonist called Y/N (short for Your Name).

The prose is intentionally, gleefully abstruse, the ponderings about the twisted nature of desire so revelatory that I… show more.