If, like me, you don’t know Tony Tulathimutte‘s name yet, you’ll never forget it after reading Rejection. It’s an astonishing, horrifying, nasty, hilarious, insightful and absolutely bonkers collection of stories. It’s not for the prudish.

In this fantastic interview between the author and Lincoln Michel, they discuss a bit of writing advice that Tulathimutte gave to Michel: “Pick your dumbest idea and write it as seriously as possible.” Tulathimutte took that advice for some of these stories, and holy cow, the result is like nothing I’ve read before.

Rejection is a collection of seven works of fiction, many interrelated, a couple of them fairly meta. They revolve around a set of characters that are lonely and unsuccessful in love and sex. Or mostly unsuccessful. When sex happens in this book, it’s awkward, weird and often more trouble than it’s worth.

I guess this originated with The Feminist, published in n+1 in 2019. It’s a killer story and you should read it now if you haven’t. It’s also the first story in this collection, but it’s not representative of what else is in there.

Tulathimutte is a writer with a zillion ideas, and no loyalty to style or good taste. The stories are more of-the-moment than anything I’ve read recently – there was some internet slang that even I had to look up, and I do this shit all day.

One story (“Our Dope Future”) is a long r/AITA post. Another takes place in large part on the group chat (“Pics”). A third (“Ahegao, or The Ballad of Sexual Repression”) is so outrageously sexually explicit that it was almost too much for me. Someone told me they read the ending of that story like 🫣. Same here.

I don’t want to say much more about it. I went in fairly cold, and I’m glad I did. The author pushes every conceivable boundary with this book, both literary and content-related. I’ll never forget it, but I’ll be awfully careful who I lend it to.

aside: when I was looking for an image of the book cover, I saw a link to the audiobook.
I can’t even imagine what that would be like.

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