✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Beautiful Losing | Los Angeles Review of Books

lareviewofbooks.org · 2,397 words · saved by 1 readers

YOU ARE REVIEWING the new novel by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, Your Name Here, which will be released this week by Dalkey Archive Press. You have decided, after a certain amount of trepidation, to write the review in the second person, which feels gimmicky but hopefully appropriate given that the book’s title and one of its several frame stories is also written in the second person. Why this should make it appropriate is, of course, a fair question. Did the reviewer of Hemingway write in terse declarative sentences? Did the reviewer of Catcher in the Rye write like a 16-year-old boarding school student? No, they did not. So, within one paragraph, you are already regretting having abandoned your staid reviewer’s coach for a vehicle that feels about as dignified as a Wienermobile. Nevertheless, you soldier on, taking heart from the novel’s own refreshing boldness, which at times during your reading experience has felt like the source of both its particular successes and its overall d

Beautiful Losing Josh Billings wonders about Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s new novel “Your Name Here.” By Josh Billings October 27, 2025 Fiction Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff . Dalkey Archive Press , 2025. 600 pages. Buy on Bookshop.org Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit? LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today! Donate YOU ARE REVIEWING

Explore this link on the map →

related reading