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"[An] audacious work of fiction . . . 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)
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.
