To God

“If you enter Yi’s fiction collection, proceed with caution — you might never leave. To read To God, one must surrender completely to the author’s strange and startling vision. This collection isn’t for the sentimental or squeamish … Yi offers her readers a dazzling cabinet of curiosities, exploring spirituality, desire and the desperate ways people grasp at each other.”
—Maddie Connors, Los Angeles Times

“In this highly original, hard-to-classify collection of short stories, [Yi] taps a well of philosophical loneliness, capturing the bleakness of modernity, societal decay, what it means to fail at what you want—as well as where to find God in it all.”
—Sophia June, Marie Claire

“The stories’ fantastical elements remind me of Jorge Luis Borges, but instead of considering libraries and encyclopedias and the persistence of memory as their subject, they treat love with the same seriousness … Someone like Borges makes you consider whether you’ve been taking his concepts seriously enough. Yi elevates love to that same level, which is where it belongs.”
—Ashley Honeysett, Chicago Review of Books

★”The collection is rife with indelible turns of phrase, and it swells into a fascinating meditation on where a writer, locked into the struggles of others, might find God. This astonishes.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“An ambitious and philosophical story collection capturing the effects of late-stage capitalism on spirituality and human connection … Existential, surrealist, and contemplative.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Throughout the collection, Yi repeatedly returns to the tension between the desire to know another person completely, the impossibility of doing so, and the strange hope that persists despite that limitation.”
—Emily Park, Booklist

“Esther Yi’s To God is a feral, virtuosic feat of language and form. It reads as though Beckett were reincarnated as a spiritually abject young woman, or if Grace Paley took acid in the future. In an age of stylistic homogeneity, it’s a rare gift to come across a book that feels this completely and shockingly original.”
—Andrew Martin, author of Down Time

“Esther Yi’s To God is a weird, sensual, and wonderful collection of stories. Yi is a master sentence writer; she thinks deeply about sentences at the molecular level. To God is a sonically perfect book.”
—Sophie Kemp, author of Paradise Logic

“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

“Esther Yi more than fulfills the promise of her incredible debut, Y/N, with this galvanic collection of stories. To God magnificently depicts the brutality of loneliness through the prism of an other-world so bleakly comical in its emotional and physical absurdity it cannot help but approach the sublime. With hysterical clarity and relentless compassion, Yi showcases not only her own inimitable talent, but exposes the infinitely strange engine of love in its most desperate operations, proving that the longing for connection is, always and everywhere, alienation’s eternal antagonist. Highly recommended for any reader currently occupying planet Earth.”
—Maryse Meijer, author of The Seventh Mansion

Esther Yi is the author of Y/N. She lives in Leipzig, Germany.

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