LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 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

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. --The New York Times, The Funniest Novels Since Catch-22

One of the really phenomenal novels I've read in the last decade. --Jonathan Franzen

From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition, and friendship in millennial San Francisco. With the social acuity of Adelle Waldman and the murderous wit of Martin Amis, Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens is a brainy, irreverent debut--This Side of Paradise for a new era.

Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel's four whip-smart narrators--idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda--are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area's maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other's lives once again.

A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.