Rejection - by Tony Tulathimutte (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION - A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

"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

"One of the foremost fiction writers exploring the subject of his own generation." --Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

Review Quotes

Named a best book of the year by The New York Times - The New Yorker - Wall Street Journal - Esquire - TIME - Kirkus - The New York Public Library - Vanity Fair - NPR - and more!

"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

"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

"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

"I felt like I knew each of the damaged maddening people in these internet-soaked stories and I have a feeling you will too. I read this in one sitting." - John Mulaney

"The funniest book I've ever read." - Bowen Yang

"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

"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

"Gutting. . . Cleverly satirizes a heartless world while nailing what stings so much about rejection." - TIME, "100 Must-Read Books of the Year"

"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"

"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

"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

"It's the funniest, darkest thing--it's like Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground meets Instagram." - St Vincent

"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"

"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)

"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

"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"

"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)

"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)

"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

"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

"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

"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."

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Tulathimutte's deft approach to writing these interconnected narratives is nothing short of brilliant." - James Yu, The Brooklyn Rail

"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