To God

“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

From the author of the acclaimed debut Y/N comes a daring collection of fiction about alienation, sex, and religious inquiry.

To God takes on love in its many forms. In “The White Michel,” the narrator makes an appearance in a fellow boxer’s sex dream, which he has upon falling asleep at his father’s funeral. A nun in “No Right Hand” likes being in a relationship with God because the more openly shameful and heat-stricken her passion for Him, the more confident He seems to feel about their relationship. And in “Mutter,” after observing a nearly extinct species of condor at the zoo, an aging mother assures her daughter that she would never die slowly that way: “Things would get so bad that you’d be relieved when I die. No, it’s healthier to catapult you into grief.”

At the core of To God is a voice, a beam of light upholding the entire collection, around which the world rearranges and reincarnates. Navigating daily life, daily alienation, and daily relationships, the voice asks the following questions: how do you construct a self; how do you know oneself; how do you know another; what does it feel like to know. The voice is born of absence and experiments with presence: a body, a personality, a set of relationships, an imagination. Absence fuels fantasy, a kind of unbridled prayer; this logic becomes a stairway that the reader gets to ascend until the entire material world recedes and all that’s left is absence again—but this time in the form of the absolute, a question to God. At the atomic level of language, the infrastructural level of genre play, and the cosmic level of existential threat, Esther Yi’s formidable talent radiates.