"This season, my literary accessory choice is Tony Tulathimutte''s Private Citizens." - Vogue "One of the really phenomenal novels I''ve read in the last decade." - Jonathan Franzen on Private Citizens "Private Citizens is a brilliant novel--whip-smart, hilarious, and entirely engrossing." - Emma Cline, New York Times bestselling author of The Girls and The Guest "The first great millennial novel." - New York magazine on Private Citizens "It may well be time that we start asking whose writing will populate the ''millennial canon.'' Tony Tulathimutte''s debut novel, Private Citizens, is the answer to that question." - Village Voice "[A] hilarious portrait of youthful self-centeredness." - The Paris Review on Private Citizens "Profane and profanely hysterical.
[Rejection] is so exactingly acidic, so entertaining in its pathos and humor, you''ll wonder how someone can so immaculately peer into the soul of millennial disorder in the way that he does. I have never laughed as hard reading a work of fiction, maybe ever, while also being challenged by the clarity of its tragic dream. Under the microscope, Tulathimutte observes and scrutinizes the anatomy of our delusions, supercharged as they are by the internet. Rejection is brain-meltingly good." - Wired "The funniest book I''ve ever read." - Bowen Yang "Maybe ''love'' is too soft-focus of a word for the mix of awe, exhilaration and, occasionally, nausea I felt while reading about the book''s unlucky protagonists. Tulathimutte writes with virtuosic brio about loneliness and humiliation. I found myself perversely heartened by his depraved genius.
His book is what I needed to read this year: bleak, funny and utterly ruthless." - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review "I can''t stop thinking about [Rejection]. It''s a glimpse into these dark areas of the internet that are very scary but also really funny and strange and kind of sad." - Randall Park, in The New York Times "One of the funniest books I''ve read in years and a smart take on how the internet breaks our brains." - NPR, "Books We Love" "Scathing, satirical. a feast of schadenfreude for the hardy reader, and rest assured that the author isn''t about to let himself off the hook. Absolutely merciless." - Chicago Public Library, "Best Books of the Year" "Gutting.
Cleverly satirizes a heartless world while nailing what stings so much about rejection." - TIME, "100 Must-Read Books of the Year" "Uproariously funny and overflowing with decidedly feel-bad vibes, this novel-in-stories skewers modern vices ranging from group texts to dating apps with precision." - San Francisco Chronicle "Don''t let the profanity of Rejection fool you--this is serious fiction. [Tulathimutte''s] fancy prose style reminded me of Nabokov if Nabokov had been born late enough to become obsessed with porn instead of butterflies." - Mike Jeffrey, The Los Angeles Review of Books "Flayed open by the author''s scrutiny, these characters blister off the page, all of them electric in their rage, their alienation, their tragicomic grossness. Paired with a deft metafictional coda, their voices coalesce into a unified theory of rejection. Perverse, profane, and profound, Rejection will make your skin crawl." - Esquire, Best Books of the Year "The closest thing to reading David Foster Wallace I''ve encountered since we lost him.
It''s upsetting and hilarious and impressively deranged." - Chris Hayes "Tulathimutte has written one of the most brilliantly funny works of fiction since Paul Beatty''s The Sellout. Reject it at one''s peril." - Shelf Awareness (starred review) "Tulathimutte''s deft approach to writing these interconnected narratives is nothing short of brilliant." - James Yu, The Brooklyn Rail "Predictable scripts are suddenly made uncanny again in this collection. Each narrative accelerates and accelerates before spectacularly crashing, as if self-annihilation is the only way out for characters who feel so entrapped by circumstance and category that they have nothing left to lose." - Jane Hu, The Washington Post "Satire is alive and well, as evidenced by Tulathimutte''s flamboyant collection. One protagonist takes to an incel message board after failing to convince women he''s a feminist.
Another sabotages his first potentially serious relationship with a man out of fear he''ll be rejected for his kink. A throbbing heart beats at the center of the hilarity and ribaldry, making this irresistible." - Publishers Weekly, Best Books of the Year "It''s the funniest, darkest thing--it''s like Dostoevsky''s Notes from Underground meets Instagram." - St Vincent "Rejection could be the year''s feel-bad book, but Tulathimutte''s inventiveness, his intellect, his sense of humor, and his precise style make his characters'' mortifications a pleasure to read. Like [Philip] Roth, Tulathimutte knows desire can be as ludicrous as it is urgent; like Roth, he likes a good dirty joke. [Rejection] deserves many and enthusiastic readers." - Matthew Keeley, The Boston Globe "A master comedian with a virtuoso prose style has produced an audacious, original and highly disturbing book . an incandescent satire.
" - Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine "Sounds unbearable, a human centipede of misery crossed with a brain worm becoming an Ouroboros. And yet it works. And it''s funny . This frantic anticipation of critique would be so annoying if it wasn''t also so smart." - Madeline Leung Coleman, Vulture "Tulathimutte is such an acutely observant writer that I was entranced by his book despite its narrowness and emotional barbarity. One of Tulathimutte''s primal topics is online culture and its diseased repercussions, and he writes about these things in the way Anthony Bourdain wrote about restaurants, Hunter S. Thompson wrote about motorcycle gangs and Molly Ivins wrote about water-headed Texas politicians. He''s alert, in other words; he''s tanked up, bleakly funny and always stropping his knife.
Tulathimutte is a big talent and he is clearly just getting started." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review "A suite of linked stories about raging losers in the Internet era, with the prose-dial turned up to gasp-inducing Nabokov and Amis levels. one of the boldest works in recent memory." - Karan Mahajan, Granta "If our chronic online existence is like shouting into the void, then Rejection is the void shouting back." - Luke Gair, The Sewanee Review (Staff Pick) "Tulathimutte''s unnerving depiction of angry losers in these interconnected stories is hard to look away from." - Vulture, "Books We Can''t Wait to Read this Fall" "Startlingly good. There''s a volatile thrill to the writing that owes to the electricity of the language but also to the collision of extreme registers. The psychic torment of these characters can be as disturbing as graphic horror stories; it can also be snortingly funny.
" - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "Tulathimutte is unafraid to write the most disturbing, disgusting, and delightfully deranged things. Each time you think the characters have hit rock bottom, they pull out a shovel and start digging more. An inventive and shameless story collection for the chronically online." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "The prose is consistently sharp and funny as Tulathimutte cuts to the truth of his characters'' dilemmas. It''s a first-rate exploration of yearning and solitude." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Tulathimutte''s linked story collection plunges into the touchy topics of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet." - The Millions, "Most Anticipated Books of Summer" "Tulathimutte is incredibly attuned to the awkwardness of modern life, and can spin the most cringy, painful moments into brilliant satire. Rejection is a collection of very smart stories for the very online; in exploring "rejection," Tulathimutte digs into the most basic of modern fears.
" - Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of the Year" "Phenomenal. few writers dramatize the effects of being perennially online as astutely and engagingly as Tulathimutte does here. Rejection is thoughtfully and artfully constructed and outrageously entertaining." - Booklist (starred review) "A blistering collection of interconnecting short stories, Rejection takes a magnifying glass to the mind in the internet age." - Vogue, "Best Books of the Year" "A hilarious, disgusting work of genius." - Leah Abrams, Interview magazine "Blazingly perceptive." - Cat Zhang, The Cut "Brain-twisting, incisive, and laugh-out-loud funny." - Angela Hui, Electric Literature "I''m not sure I''ve ever read a more gleefully merciless book than Tony Tulathimutte''s brilliant novel in stories.
Tulathimutte is a connoisseur of the humiliating desires that lurk within all of us. Luckily, he''s also outrageously funny, which makes it impossible to put the book down, even when the cringe threatens to annihilate you." - Jessie Gaynor, Literary Hub "Obsessively readable, acerbic, Foster Wallace-inflected." - Vanity Fair "Not until I picked up Tony Tulathim.