Rejection: Fiction
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION
"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
From the Whiting and O. Henry-winning author of Private Citizens ("the first great millennial novel," New York Magazine), an electrifying novel-in-stories that follows a cast of intricately linked characters as rejection throws their lives and relationships into chaos.
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.
In "The Feminist," a young man's passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn't getting him laid. A young woman's unrequited crush in "Pics" spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in "Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression," a shy late bloomer's flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other's dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.
These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.
"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
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Tony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens and Rejection. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, N+1, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times. The recipient of an O. Henry Award and a Whiting Award, he runs the writing class CRIT in Brooklyn.
"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
"Not until I picked up Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection did I realize how fun it could be to read a book about a bunch of huge fucking losers. . . . it's a thrill for the sickos among us, the king being Tulathimutte, who gives loserdom its own rancid carnival. Tulathimutte understands the project--both his own and that of his characters--with diagnostic, comprehensive hyper-precision; as you behold his parade of marketplace failure and personal pathology, he's ten steps ahead of any reaction you could muster. . . . one of the foremost fiction writers exploring the subject of his own generation." -- Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
"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
"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"
"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
"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
"Obsessively readable, acerbic, Foster Wallace-inflected." -- Vanity Fair
"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)
"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
"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
"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)
"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'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
