Your Name Here - by Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff (Paperback)

About the Book

"A major literary event over two decades in the making, Your Name Here marks the seismic return of Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai), and will introduce readers to the riveting voice of Ilya Gridneff. A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America's "War on Terror," countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique. A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler; Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A major literary event over two decades in the making, Your Name Here marks the seismic return of Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai), and will introduce readers to the riveting voice of Ilya Gridneff.

A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America's "War on Terror," countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.

A metafictional Pygmalion story reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated Adaptation, or Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler; Your Name Here is a rare work of art that captures the process of becoming itself. A reminder that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage look the same at the start.

Review Quotes

"A work of genius... What began as a playful collaboration became, like most of DeWitt's work, weirder, riskier and more ambitious. After at least 20 drafts and countless revisions, it morphed into a 600-page work that resists categorization and almost defies description." -The New York Times Magazine

"An audacious metafiction . . . Readers will be left breathless." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"An ouroboros--and a big one at that--of a postmodern yarn that threatens to swallow itself at any moment . . . At once bewildering and beguiling, and a groaning-table feast of words." --Kirkus Reviews

"DeWitt is a brilliant risk-taker. I truly have no idea what to expect." --The New York Times, "10 Things We're Excited About This Fall"

"Refreshing[ly] bold . . . The structure produces opportunities for tension and momentum, winding around a convergence in which everything feels as if it is just around the corner." --Los Angeles Review of Books

"This is hit-and-run, take-no-prisoners writing." --Times Literary Supplement

"Although the book may appear, to begin with, to be plotless, it turns out to be tightly organized: a Godard-like enfilade of shaftings, a frontispiece-of-Leviathan-type portrait of the world as a great 'Biz' made up of millions of little bizzes . . . Your Name Here is a novel that doesn't really believe in novels. The writing is delightfully shameless, disheveled and dissolute; globalized and pornified and digitized somehow, bit after bit after bit." --The London Review of Books

"Peerless." --Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

"Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff's Your Name Here has been the novel of the century for almost two decades, despite almost no one having read it. Now, at long last, Your Name Here is here. Not a rumor, not an excerpt, not a PDF: this is the real thing--a hilarious, insatiably imaginative meta-meta-meta-novel that takes every risk and plays every card and captures, maybe like no other novel, the internet's jarring dislocations and formal possibilities. Still wildly ahead of its time, Your Name Here contains a multitude of voices so funny, so dark, so alive to every contingency that I wish it were twice as long. What a blast!" --Mark Krotov, coeditor of n+1 and The Intellectual Situation

"A work of genius... What began as a playful collaboration became, like most of DeWitt's work, weirder, riskier and more ambitious. After at least 20 drafts and countless revisions, it morphed into a 600-page work that resists categorization and almost defies description." --The New York Times Magazine

"An audacious metafiction . . . Readers will be left breathless." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"An ouroboros--and a big one at that--of a postmodern yarn that threatens to swallow itself at any moment . . . At once bewildering and beguiling, and a groaning-table feast of words." --Kirkus Reviews

"DeWitt is a brilliant risk-taker. I truly have no idea what to expect." --The New York Times, "10 Things We're Excited About This Fall"

"Refreshing[ly] bold . . . The structure produces opportunities for tension and momentum, winding around a convergence in which everything feels as if it is just around the corner." --Los Angeles Review of Books

"This is hit-and-run, take-no-prisoners writing." --Times Literary Supplement

"Although the book may appear, to begin with, to be plotless, it turns out to be tightly organized: a Godard-like enfilade of shaftings, a frontispiece-of-Leviathan-type portrait of the world as a great 'Biz' made up of millions of little bizzes . . . Your Name Here is a novel that doesn't really believe in novels. The writing is delightfully shameless, disheveled and dissolute; globalized and pornified and digitized somehow, bit after bit after bit." --The London Review of Books

"Peerless." --Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

"Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff's Your Name Here has been the novel of the century for almost two decades, despite almost no one having read it. Now, at long last, Your Name Here is here. Not a rumor, not an excerpt, not a PDF: this is the real thing--a hilarious, insatiably imaginative meta-meta-meta-novel that takes every risk and plays every card and captures, maybe like no other novel, the internet's jarring dislocations and formal possibilities. Still wildly ahead of its time, Your Name Here contains a multitude of voices so funny, so dark, so alive to every contingency that I wish it were twice as long. What a blast!" --Mark Krotov, coeditor of n+1 and The Intellectual Situation

About the Author

Helen DeWitt is the author of The Last Samurai, which has been named one of the best books of the 21st century by multiple publications. She is also the author of Lightning Rods, as well as a collection of short stories, Some Trick, and a novella, The English Understand Wool. She lives in Berlin.

Ilya Gridneff is a Toronto-based journalist working for the Financial Times. Over the years he has written articles for The Baffler, Vice, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Foreign Policy. He has lived and worked in Somalia, Kenya, South Sudan, Papua New Guinea, London and Berlin.