Rejection

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What to expect

‘A thrill for the sickos among us’ JIA TOLENTINO

‘Utterly inimitable’ RAVEN LEILANI

‘Unrelentingly brutal and gut-bustingly funny and spares no one’ CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

‘Symbiotically serious and funny’ MEGAN NOLAN

‘A wild, brutally funny chain of stories about people coming apart’ JACK EDWARDS

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION

An audacious and original novel-in-stories following 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 thorniest problems of modern life: sex, relationships, identity and the internet.

We see a tryhard male feminist's passionate allyship turn to a furious and debilitating nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that his feminism isn’t getting him laid; a young woman’s unrequited crush spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of both her sense of self and her group chat; and witness a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship lead to a life-upending mistake. As these 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 that our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

Written with the accomplished authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a losers’ manifesto, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte radically redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society and oneself.

A Book of the Year in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New Yorker, NPR, Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Electric Literature and more.

‘A book of mad, madcap genius’ GARTH GREENWELL

‘Tulathimutte is a big talent’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

‘Blistering … takes a magnifying glass to the mind in the internet age’ VOGUE

‘There’s a volatile thrill to the writing … snortingly funny’ WALL STREET JOURNAL

‘Obsessively readable, acerbic, Foster Wallace–inflected’ VANITY FAIR

‘A master comedian with a virtuoso prose style … audacious, original and highly disturbing’ NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Critics Review

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‘Perversely funny and piercingly perceptive’ Financial Times

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‘A hilarious, disgusting work of genius’ Interview

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‘At once entertaining and acute … the stories capture the spirit of our doomscrolling age’ Guardian

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‘The funniest book I’ve read for a long time. So sharp and shrewd and entertaining’ David Nicholls, author of You Are Here

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‘Tulathimutte captures a world in which we have too much communication and not nearly enough real human contact’ The Times

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‘One of the funniest books I’ve read in years and a smart take on how the internet breaks our brains’ NPR

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‘Divinely appalling … It is quite difficult to laugh so hard while also being goldfish-mouthed at its audacity’ Scotsman

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‘Tulathimutte prises open and peers into the ugliest parts of the modern psyche … viscerally uncomfortable’ TLS

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‘Explores modern loneliness and atomisation with startling lucidity’ Service95

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‘Gutting … Cleverly satirizes a heartless world’ TIME

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‘I found myself perversely heartened by [Tulathimutte's] depraved genius … bleak, funny and utterly ruthless’ Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Book Review

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‘Obsessively readable, acerbic, Foster Wallace-inflected’ Vanity Fair

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‘I have never laughed as hard reading a work of fiction, maybe ever … brain-meltingly good’ Wired

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‘The prose-dial turned up to gasp-inducing Nabokov and Amis levels … one of the boldest works in recent memory’ Karan Mahajan, Granta

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‘You will be crawling out of your skin from the very first words’ Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror

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‘Unrelentingly brutal and gut-bustingly funny and spares no one … Tulathimutte is a pervert and a madman and a stone-cold genius’ Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

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‘Fast and funny, a delirious convergence of the haptic and uncanny’ Raven Leilani, author of Luster

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‘The funniest, darkest thing – like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground meets Instagram’ St Vincent

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