DeWITT, Helen; GRIDNEFF, Ilya
Your Name Here

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. [publishers’ note]

Your Name Here begins with a reclusive novelist, Helen DeWitt, alone in Berlin, who starts to mix into her writing the emails of a globetrotting paparazzo, Ilya Gridneff. It is a Pygmalion story with the sexes reversed. Gridneff is the young writer who sends DeWitt reports from the front lines—of his affairs of the heart, of the media pursuit of Britney Spears, and of Iraq, where he goes to report on the war. The character Helen seems to have found a way to grasp the real world without leaving her writer’s desk: she’ll make a novel of it all, and bring both herself and Ilya back into the world of money and success. But making a novel from real life is easier said than done, the more so when Helen’s creation turns out to include the frustrations of the collaboration itself—along with readers’ constant efforts to read the final result before we have read it, this book that DeWitt has put together... [n+1]

Originally released as a PDF on DeWitt’s website in 2008, and now available in print for the first time, the novel … [moves] from New York to Berlin, London, and the Middle East, and [explores] the nature of collaboration as well as the function of literature in an era of narrowed horizons. Your Name Here is an ouroboros: a meandering and digressive account of its own creation by two writers stymied by a parochial publishing industry and the exigencies of making rent. [The Nation]

Published by Deep Vellum Publishing, 2025
Literature