Your Name Here

Your Name Here is a novel by Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai, written with Ilya Gridneff, whose voice carries much of the book. It comes more than twenty years after her earlier work and is built as a honeycomb of books within books.

DeWitt and Gridneff draw together a wide range of material: America's War on Terror, a long span of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, several languages, emails, images, and graphs. The result is a work of unusual scope and ambition.

It is a metafictional take on the Pygmalion story, in the vein of Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated film Adaptation or Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. The book sets out to capture the process of becoming, and it acknowledges that a masterpiece and a doomed voyage can look identical at the outset.