YOUR NAME HERE will be published on September 24, 2025, under the Dalkey Archive, by Deep Vellum.
SEPTEMBER 23, 2024 — Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive are thrilled to announce a literary event almost twenty years in the making:
Arriving in 2025, YOUR NAME HERE marks the seismic return of Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai), and introduces the riveting voice of Ilya Gridneff. This death-defying feat of a novel will be published by Dalkey Archive Press one year from today, on September 23, 2025.
There have been whispers about YOUR NAME HERE for nearly two decades. The first chapter of the novel appeared in n+1 back in 2008, where it was hailed as “an important and complicated work of art.” In the intervening years, the novel has been lurking in the periphery of the literary world, always with the caveat that it is too ambitious to be fully realized in print. It was available, briefly, as a text-only .pdf that has long disappeared into the abyss of the internet. When it was mentioned offhand by the critic Lauren Oyler in 2019, she dubbed it both “peerless” and “difficult.”
Paradoxically torrential and broken, Dewitt and Gridneff’s collaboration deftly anticipated both the “internet novel” and the contemporary novel of fragments.
A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular matryoshka doll of books-within-books. Our authors synthesize America’s “War on Terror,” countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, Lacanian dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, and one page whose only text reads “FUCK YOU” in 120-point font.
But at its core, Your Name Here is a book about the failure of Your Name Here—about DeWitt and Gridneff’s inability to find a publisher for their project. About their doubts about each other as collaborators, and the triumphs and frustrations of the creative process.
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.
We cannot wait to share this “peerless and difficult” novel and prove the rumors all true: Your Name Here really is “an important and complicated work of art.” Sixteen years after that first excerpt, the world has finally caught up with YOUR NAME HERE.
For questions, publicity inquiries, galley requests, or media appearances, please contact publicity@deepvellum.org
YOU’RE GOING TO PARIS. It’s an 8-hour flight from New York. You want something to read on the plane. You’ve been meaning to read Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation, but you’re not sure you’ll be able to concentrate. The last four days have been wrecked.
The name on the ticket is Antonios Demetriakis. It matches the name on the passport. The picture in the passport doesn’t match what you saw in the mirror. The feeling that aliens from Planet Zworg have performed plastic surgery while you slept is not unfamiliar.
The plan suggested by the documentation leads inexorably doomwards, to passport officials, security guards, petty teetotalitarian apparatchiks unlikely to be open to the Zworg hypothesis. Failure to follow the plan may prompt swift reprisals from Zworg. You want something to read on the plane, but this is no time for Pity the Nation.
The book is on a table in [Barnes & Noble/Borders/Waldenstone’s/Dalton’s/Other, delete as appropriate], part of a 3-for-2 offer. You’ve also been meaning to read Seymour Hersh’s Chain of Command, and this too is in the 3-for-2 deal. They’ve got Gravity’s Rainbow by the notorious recluse Thomas Pynchon. Mao II by DeLillo, The Border Trilogy by McCarthy, Catcher in the Rye by Salinger, notorious recluses to a man. They’ve got The Loser, a novel about the notorious recluse Glenn Gould by the notorious misanthrope Thomas Bernhard. They’ve got Lotteryland by the reclusive misanthropic Zozanian. You feel surly and uncommunicative, you hate your fellow man, reclusiveness and misanthropy could be the hair of the dog. They’ve also got Helen DeWitt’s new book, Your Name Here.
Your friend Mike has been telling you for years to read DeWitt’s first book, The Last Samurai (which is not on the 3-for-2 table). He went to his friend Dan’s place in Seoul in 2002; the book was lying on the bed, which took up 60% of the studio apartment. (Dan is now a big pop star with a bigger apartment.) Mike didn’t much like the cover; he asked: “Is this a romance novel?” “It’s fantastic, you should definitely read it,” said Dan. The book was in surprisingly good condition. “You finished it?” “Just the first chapter. But it’s good.” Mike was bored, needed a book, smuggled it out in his bag, read it in two days, called Dan. “Yeah, what’s up?” said Dan. “Yo, Last Samurai is so good. It’s so fuckin’ good.” “Yeah, I told you it’s good. Did you take my fucking book?” Mike hung up, smoked five cigarettes, went to sleep. Told all his friends, including you, to read the book. You’d heard the book was full of Greek and Japanese, a much-needed gap in your life, and Mike said, “No, no, you have to read it, it’s fucking great, there is Greek and Japanese, but it’s motivated.” But Mike is the first-son-of-the-first-son-of-the-first-son-of-the . . . for 11 generations going back to King Sejong, inventor of the Korean alphabet. This may be the warped perception of a descendant of Korean royalty with alphabetic obsession in the DNA. Also, Mike is not unconnected with your present hatred of the world. Not unconnected with bad, baaaaaaaad nights at Kim’s Korean Karaoke. Not to be trusted.
Something’s bothering you, but you can’t put your finger on it.
You pick up Your Name Here. There’s a quote on the cover.
You can read the rest of Chapter 1 here