To God

“Sumptuous, precise, and full of pulsing, startling life, Yi captures with finesse . . . the very heartbeat of contemporary longing.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

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

The cityscape of To God is in decay. One won’t find any fancy flaneurs here. As for happiness? Out of the question. Instead, one encounters drifters with nowhere to go and nothing to do, boxers with dreams of making it big (they won’t), artists who never get a chance to make art, women who frighten the men they love, and children who are more adult than the adults. Nothing goes right for these people—but what does going right mean anyway? After all, in the world of To God, it’s the loser who wins, the faceless who expresses, the atheist who truly believes, and the geriatric who’s reborn . . .

At the heart of To God is a formidable voice, a beam of light that cuts through the entire collection to rearrange and reincarnate the world wherever it falls. Navigating the daily vicissitudes of work, love, and ideology, this voice asks: How do I know myself, and how do I know others? What does it feel like to know at all? What if I believe in nothing? Then what makes me live? Responsive to and born out of absence, this voice experiments with presence: a body, a personality, a set of relationships. Absence fuels the imagination, a kind of unbridled prayer, and this ritual becomes a stairway that the reader is invited to ascend, armed with an ever intensifying question to God, until the entire material world recedes out of view—only to reappear with greater urgency than before, openly necrotic and broken, itself a plane of mystery we can never call home, and its stakes all the more real for it.

At the atomic level of language, the infrastructural level of genre play, and the cosmic level of existential threat, Esther Yi’s vision radiates, illuminating the increasingly confused coordinates of contemporary life, its absurd contradictions, and our growing disconnectedness not only from each other but from our own selves.