From the Publisher
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”
“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”
“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 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)
“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)
“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”
"Tulathimutte is utterly inimitable. Rejection is fast and funny, a delirious convergence of the haptic and uncanny." — Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster
"Rejection is unrelentingly brutal and gut-bustingly funny and spares no one—not you, not me. Tulathimutte is a pervert and a madman and a stone-cold genius." — Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
“Tony Tulathimutte’s supercharged prose and profound existential comedy reveal something true at the heart of our desperate human condition. Rejection is a book of mad, madcap genius.” — Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness
"I could compare Rejection to the work of Nabokov, in its stylish and blazingly original skewering of convention; or to that of Roth, in the daring with which it plumbs the darkest depths of the human psyche to excavate what is most vulnerable about us; or to the worst (by which I mean best) Am I the Asshole post you’ve ever read on Reddit, in its commitment to embodying its characters at their neediest and most candid and therefore most delectable. But to do so would be to sell it short. I finished Rejection breathless with admiration. It is — Tulathimutte is — that rare thing in American literature: truly original." — Vauhini Vara, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Immortal King Rao
“The stories in Rejection ring with audacity like a siren. The characters within are deliriously shocking, toxic, transgressive, but due to Tulathimutte’s extraordinary talents, the most frightening moments in the collection—those which make this book feel truly dangerous—are those of empathy. It’s this vertiginous event, feeling like I’m leering on from behind the safety of a glass wall, savoring the thrill of moving in for a far closer peek than I’d ever dare in the wild, then suddenly realizing I’m the one behind the glass, a complicit specimen who’s just been collected via the author’s mastery that will have me reading and rereading this book until I die or can no longer stand it. Tulathimutte is peerless.” — Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and Tampa
“From the opening sentence of Rejection, I was cannonballed into the twisted, obscene, pleasurable world of pure genius. It’s actually sick how Tony Tulathimutte has managed to make his prodigious, byzantine mind so compulsively readable and immaculately accessible, not to mention how, again and again, his deranged humor crosses over the threshold of the ordinary and into the astral realm. Read this book and you too will develop a fetish and taste for Tulathimutte’s gift for satire and insight into the human condition. You’ll never read a book like this again.” — Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart
"One of the really phenomenal novels I've read in the last decade." — Jonathan Franzen on Private Citizens
“Scathing, upsetting and generous all at once, this novel, about millennial friends in pre-2008-crash San Francisco, thrums with Tulathimutte’s sly intelligence and unerring comic timing. . . . The warm flashes make the satire cut deeper: Tulathimutte loves these imperfect young humans while seeing them for who they are.” — The New York Times, “The Funniest Novels Since Catch-22," 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
“This season, my literary accessory choice is Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens.” — Vogue
“Private Citizens is a combustible combination of acrobatic language, dead-on observations and hilarious, heartbreaking storytelling. Tulathimutte has created characters that are hard to forget—first they’ll make you want to strangle them, then you’ll end up falling in love with them.” — Angela Flournoy, National Book Award finalist and author of The Turner House
“A spot-on rendering of contemporary San Francisco in all its numinous hippie- hipster- techbro- burnout- activist-ridden glory. But it is the book’s style that makes it stand out. Tony Tulathimutte writes sentences with a reckless verve that reminds one of the best of David Foster Wallace. He’s a major American talent.” — Karan Mahajan, author of Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs, on Private Citizens
“Private Citizens is the product of a whirring intellect with brilliance to burn. It examines the anxieties and privileges of the Millennial Generation as well as any book I’ve come across. Reading Tony Tulathimutte is like watching a mad genius at work in his laboratory, conjuring the magnificent and the monstrous into life.” — Anthony Marra, New York Times-bestselling author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
“Private Citizens is a freak of literature—a novel so authentic, hilarious, elegantly plotted, and heartbreaking that I’d follow it anywhere. Tony Tulathimutte is a singular intellect with an uncanny 40/20 vision on the world.” — Jennifer duBois, author of Cartwheel and A Partial History of Lost Causes
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-07-10
Rejection alters the course of reality for the characters in this memorable novel-in-stories.
Tulathimutte’s innovative collection features seven interconnected stories all dealing with rejection in one way or another. Contextualizing the whole collection, the opening story, “The Feminist,” follows a self-proclaimed feminist man over decades as he gathers his “thickening dossier of unfairness.” In “Pics,” Alison, a woman in her late 20s, becomes unintentionally obsessed with a longtime friend with whom she’s had a one-time fling. In between stalking him on social media, crafting apology emails, adopting a unique and questionable pet, and considering starting a podcast, she texts her friends from a former internship; the group chat—full of sexual puns, therapy-speak, comedic bits, and emojis—shows the full extent of Alison’s spiral. In “Our Dope Future,” a home-schooled “serial entrepreneur, inventor, and futurist” writes a Reddit post from hell; using co-opted slang, the narrator slowly reveals the lengths he’s willing to go to firm up his romantic and domestic future. 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. Some have a stunning lack of self-awareness, while others are too aware to function. They all, however, seem to be bottomless pits of want and desire and vulnerability. Their need for approval, acceptance, relevancy, and even chaos is so intense that it can feel nauseating at times. Tulathimutte’s writing is not only smart, but laugh-out-loud funny. In “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” the newly out narrator tries to explain the vanilla version of his sexual desires to his boyfriend—and his boyfriend cracks an incredible Stanley Kubrick sex joke. The characters, ideas, and symbols echo across the stories, and these metatextual layers—along with the layers of internet lore and memes—create a hilariously brazen and existentially unsettling portrait of modern life, love, and identity.
An inventive and shameless story collection for the chronically online.
