Mean Boys

Get in the xigxag app
Already purchased

Click to open directly in the xigxag app.

This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book. Pre-order Buy Now ${{ price }} Send as a gift
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Mean Boys written and read by Geoffrey Mak.

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY DEBUTIFUL, LIT HUB, PASTE MAGAZINE, BOOK RIOT, INSIDE HOOK, AND NYLON

"This book is a rare comfort, a companion . . . Makes you say: yes, that is exactly how it is.”—Torrey Peters

A ferocious inquiry into art and desire, style and politics, madness and salvation, and coming of age in our volatile, image-obsessed present.

You know them when you see them: mean boys take up space, wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order. Some mean boys make art or music or fashion; others make memes. Mean boys stomp the runways in Milan and Paris; mean boys marched at Charlottesville. And in the eyes of critic and style expert Geoffrey Mak, mean boys are the emblem of our society: an era ravenous for novelty, always thirsting for the next edgy thing, even at our peril.

In this pyrotechnic memoir-in-essays, Mak ranges widely over our landscape of paranoia, crisis, and frenetic, clickable consumption. He grants readers an inside pass to the spaces where culture was made and unmade over the past decade, from the antiseptic glare of white-walled galleries to the darkest corners of Berlin techno clubs. As the gay son of an evangelical minister, Mak fled to those spaces, hoping to join a global, influential elite. But when calamity struck, it forced Mak to confront the costs of mistaking status for belonging. Fusing personal essay and cultural critique, Mean Boys investigates exile and return, transgression and forgiveness, and the value of faith, empathy, and friendship in a world designed to make us want what is bad for us.

Critics Review

No one before Geoffrey Mak has so well described the ‘feeling’ of the Millennial era that ended with the pandemic—or acknowledged the absolute vanishing of this ‘feeling’ ever since, along with the alienation and exquisite spiritual longing left in its wake. This book is a rare comfort, a companion, a book that makes you say: yes, that is exactly how it is.
Torrey Peters, bestselling author of DETRANSITION, BABY
In eight arresting essays, Geoffrey Mak probes culture and selfhood.
Vanity Fair
Mak investigates art and desire, transgression and forgiveness, and ultimately, the value of connection in a sick world.
Nylon
A compelling chronicle of [Mak’s] rise as a critic and style expert.
The Boston Globe
In Mean Boys, Mak maps the wide range of male insecurity, drawing a distinction between self-destruction and the destruction of others, while also letting these outcomes brush up against each other and even bleed together.
The Baffler
An engaging and smart combination of personal history, psychological interrogation, and commentary on (and the questioning of) contemporary culture and image. This book is what happens when a cool kid grows up to become a curious, compassionate, and cool man.
Washington Independent Review of Books
An intellectually rigorous memoir-in-essays that pairs reflections on [Mak’s] difficult sexual coming-of-age with sharp musings on the digital era . . . By turns heartbreaking, enlightening, and frenzied, this burrows deep in the reader’s psyche and doesn’t let go.
Publishers Weekly
A young, queer, Chinese American writer ‘well versed in the theoretical discourse’ takes on fashion, social media, and urban nightlife . . . [Mak] offers trenchant observations about the emasculation of the Asian American male and identity-based rejection . . . After fashion, career, psychosis, and recovery, a personal essayist finds ‘grace in the ordinary.
Kirkus Reviews
A piercing inquiry into the long 2010s: platform Crocs and Normcore; failed digital media strategies and right-wing trolls; American expats in Berlin and the rebirth of the rave. Mak tries to figure out what sanity should look like when the world is deranged. He finds one thing is certain: the old models are obsolete.
Emily Witt, author of FUTURE SEX
Mean Boys charts the anxious contradictions of being of two worlds at once and invites us to feel the past as it is and then again as it was. Geoffrey Mak’s precision, perspective, and approach reveal a masterful pen.
Camonghne Felix, author of DYSCALCULIA
Geoffrey Mak has a rare ability to inhabit and narrate the contemporary, that enticing hollow of the now, as seen and heard and felt from its current cores of Berlin and New York. There, art, fashion, and nightlife are one continuous attraction, best investigated through the art of hanging out, at which Mak is both a deft hand and delightfully self-aware. What emerges are many of the themes of our times: psychosis, vertigo, addiction, identity, status, casual sex, casual violence, the post-industrial hustle. In the corners lurk the mean boys, avatars of the sheer carelessness of power. Yet Mak also discovers something like a faith in the precious, passing quality of anything that can be truly cherished. His is a sensibility of shelter in the storm.
McKenzie Wark, author of RAVING

About xigxag

Experience the best audiobooks with xigxag, an innovative and user-friendly audiobook platform designed for seamless discovery, purchase, and enjoyment of your favorite titles. Our flexible pricing model offers bestselling audiobooks for less, providing affordable prices and the best audiobook deals without requiring a subscription. Perfect for gifting, xigxag also features convenient audiobook gift cards and in-app audiobook gifting options.

 

Beyond the listening experience, xigxag stands as an exciting alternative to big tech, embodying a strong commitment to sustainability and ethical practices. As the only B Corp certified UK audiobook service, we ensure a guilt-free listening experience from a leader in audiobook innovation.

 

Effortlessly search audiobooks, access honest audiobook reviews that evaluate both the content and narration, and easily discover hidden gems. Whether you prefer to download or stream top audiobook titles, xigxag provides the best possible listening experience anytime, anywhere, on the UK’s best independent audiobook app. Discover the future of audiobooks today.