New Millennium Boyz - by Alex Kazemi (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The debut novel hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a "toxic teenage boy anthem," that shook up the indie lit scene and landed on conservative book ban lists and controversial celebrity bookshelves, finally arrives in paperback.

NYLON Magazine Must-Reads September 2023
One of W Magazine's 25 Most Anticipated Books Fall 2023
One of Dennis Cooper's Favorite Novels of 2023

"This book is raunchy, raucous, and sure to offend." --Ellen Hopkins

Brad Sela's slow suburban life takes a whirlwind turn when two new transfer students, Lu, a Marilyn Manson fan with an unpredictable evil side, and Shane, a depressed stoner, shake up his Y2K senior year.

As Brad dives deeper into the boys' twisted world, he embarks on a dangerous journey, indulging his darkest impulses as he and his new friends document their most disturbing exploits on Handycams. As the boys' antics spiral out of control, Brad's double life edges toward exposure, pulling him further into self-destruction and chaos.

As deviant as it is defiant, this dark and satirical takedown of the extreme teen genre presents a documentarian's portrait of the late 1990s, where traditional masculinity, the early internet, and pop culture collided. Provocative and alarming, Kazemi's work critiques contemporary upper-class American life, crossing all lines as the book seduces, shocks, breaks your heart, and leaves you laughing--albeit sadistically. New Millennium Boyz presents an uncensored and unsettling portrayal of the year 2000 that never could have aired on MTV.

"Kazemi's prose produces the same visceral response as an early Tarantino movie. Proceed with caution." --Douglas Rushkoff

"In New Millennium Boyz, Alex Kazemi dissects the post-Columbine generation with wit and a sharp scalpel. His characters are damaged products of their time. While this is a dark chronicle, there's also a cozy High School Confidential feel to the tale and the various media Kazemi employs to tell it, resulting in a compulsively readable novel." --Poppy Z. Brite

"New Millennium Boyz reads like a script for an American high school classic... Kazemi... writes with such vivid candour that you can practically smell the fresh paint coming off the white picket fences of the wide suburban streets, Stars and Stripes waving in the breeze and the engines of Jeep convertibles revving into high school car parks." --The Face

"Millennial boyhood was way more messed up than we'd like to remember. Alex Kazemi's debut novel won't let us forget. Against the backdrop of our current Y2K nostalgia overload and the creeping manosphere discourse, New Millennium Boyz connects the dots back to the Columbine generation." --Vanity Fair

Review Quotes

"...a raw, raunchy, alternately sickening, sweet, maddening and heartbreaking read that immerses you in the lives of three privileged high school boys living out their senior year of 1999-2000, staving off boredom via increasingly depraved adventures. I could hardly put the book down, partly because it's an addictive page-turner but also because it is set in such a specific time and through events that I reported on during my time as a correspondent for MTV News."--John Norris, Daily Beast

"New Millennium Boyz is a VR trip into the sludge of 1999... Kazemi takes a jackhammer to our often reductive nostalgia of the era, revealing its debauched sticky slime."--Nylon

"Alex Kazemi is a boy wonder."--Shirley Manson

"As one might expect from its turn-of-the-century setting, New Millennium Boyz exists in the shadow of Columbine, engaging with the dark mythos that the shooters left behind."--V Magazine

"I walked a path parallel to my own, and it was honest, authentic and awful. New Millennium Boyz is an intrusively intimate narration of someone who lived in familiar coordinates yet a different social stratum. That wholly un-unique alienation and emptiness is one that fills me with a nostalgia for a past that was, and was not, my own."--Brooks Brown, Columbine Survivor and Author

"In New Millennium Boyz, moments of brutal violence, underage sex, and slur-laden dialogue cut through the bleak boredom of teenage suburbia--and they don't go unpunished. At the same time, he's critical of the lazy antagonism that's typical of his contemporaries, singling out the creatives and podcasters that have emerged from the "post-Red Scare" cultural landscape."--Dazed

"Kazemi beautifully captures that psychological phase in high school where people leave childhood friends for new ones."--Washington Independent Review of Books

"Male culture is only getting more difficult for young boys and men to navigate. They deserve better, and this book, in all of its violence, depravity and desperation should be read as a demand to change our collective culture that strips so many young men of their humanity... to all of our detriment. You will want to put this book down many times, similar to the way we turn our heads or click away from news that overwhelms us. But we all, whether we are aware of it or not, are in this world that Kazemi is forcing us to look at."--Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes

"Please consider adding Mr. Kazemi's tome to your personal library."--Dennis Cooper

"There's no way a robot wrote this book. A no-holds-barred tour of the Millennial mindset's spiritual DNA. Anything goes."--Douglas Coupland

About the Author

Alex Kazemi is a pop artist, creative director, and novelist. He served as Features Editor for the inaugural edition of King Kong Garçon and his work has been featured in Dazed, i-D, Playboy, Resident Advisor, King Kong, V, Paper, The New York Observer, Wonderland, and Oyster, among others. He lives in Vancouver.