With great thematic, aesthetic, and emotional consistency, the stories in Esther Yi’s new collection, To God, ask what it means to love someone fully, and to place that love at the center of your life. What sort of person would do that, whom do they love, and what kind of world is strange enough to allow it?
“I wish to love just one person unconditionally and indefatigably, like a machine. And should that love nonetheless wilt and expire, meaning it was never love to begin with, the reason wouldn’t be ‘I’m only human’ but rather ‘I’m not nonhuman enough.’ The reason would be that I’ve failed as a nonhuman, and I’d be accordingly ashamed of myself.”
This is the narrator of the story “Centripetal,” who is waiting for her encounter with a man she knows she is destined to love. The men who are the objects of love in these stories are more lovable because they are inadequate. When she meets the man she’s been waiting for, he’s uglier than she expected, but “it moves me to know the exact way in which he doesn’t look good.” And he questions her obsessive love. ”Your love seems scary…” he says, and she responds, “What else would it be?”
Seeking a lover and seeking a kind of perfect love are obsessions, though the narrators’ ideas of perfect love are not like other people’s. But the language of these stories does not always live up to the characters’ uncompromising values. For example, in “White Anton,” a woman’s sparring partner at a boxing gym tells her that he had a dream about her. She says, “The dream’s content must’ve been of an intimacy we lacked in reality.” This construction—“the content [must have] been of”—is clumsy, and there are many such sentences, inelegantly written and not corrected by editing. These are portrayals of uncompromising people, some of them writers, with lofty ideals about love, but their standards are not always truly exacting.
The stories are set in strange realities—for example, in “Ultramontane,” the pores of the narrator’s skin visibly open to drink the rain. These strange realities are necessary because the characters’ high standards for love couldn’t exist in an ordinary world. But I felt the kind of fatigue I often feel when reading fiction with non-realist elements. It drove me to look up the H.G. Wells quotation, “Nothing remains interesting, where anything may happen.” Characters find the person they need or lose the person they need, or find things and places changed, with the logic of dreams—not as a result of other things that have happened before, at least not in a literal way. This can be tedious and worsens when the language is clumsy.
This collection follows Yi’s debut novel, Y/N, which also portrayed uncompromising love, this time through an obsessive fan who goes in search of a K-Pop idol after he disappears from public life. That book explored other themes as well, so it is interesting to see the way Yi returns relentlessly to love in story after story in To God, because it makes it clear that love is this author’s true subject. With Y/N, she already found a perfect expression of her theme, and I was exhilarated by how she set up an insane premise and stuck with it for the length of a novel. These short stories, being short, don’t offer that same satisfaction.
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. And it is not only love between lovers, but also between parents and children, and between friends. (I love the line in No Right Hand that sums up a best friendship by saying, “Aren’t we trying to think better together?”) Yi is thinking about exactly the right way things should be between people. About the morality and value of life as being in loving correctly. 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.
FICTION
By Esther Yi
Astra House
Published October 13, 2026
