YOUR NAME HERE by Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff | Coming 2025

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