[WARNING: the following contains quotations that include profanity]

Rejection isn’t the same as heartbreak, which entails a past acceptance. A rejection implies that you don’t even warrant a try. From the reject’s perspective, the reciprocity of heartbreak looks pretty appealing. And if you’re going to suffer, it may as well be exciting. Who would choose the flat desolation of rejection over rough-and-tumble drama, especially if they end the same way? The cliché—tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all—is comforting to the heartbroken, but damning to the rejected. No matter how unpleasant or unequal, a breakup is at least something you share with someone else. Rejection makes only one reject. “Unrequited love does not die,” writes Elle Newmark in The Book of Unholy Mischief, “it’s only beaten down to a secret place where it hides, curled and wounded. For some unfortunates, it turns bitter and mean, and those who come after pay the price for the hurt done by the one who came before.” A story that begins with closure can never end.

The basic plot of rejection is simple. First comes the yearning, where “by the successive inventions of his desires, his regrets, his disappointments, and his projects, the lover constructs an entire novel around a woman he does not know,” as Proust writes. Eventually you make a proposition and are declined. You may try again, but only the same happens—nothing.

What science has to say about rejection is mostly what everyone already knows: it’s real and it hurts. In an fMRI study researcher Naomi Eisenberger demonstrated that being rejected lights up the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that deals with physical pain, with a corresponding release of dopamine and cortisol. The social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Dawn Dhavale’s study “Two Sides of Romantic Rejection,” typical of much writing in their field, spells out common sense to a point of absurd rigor (they note that “it is better to be intelligent and beautiful than stupid and ugly”). They define romantic rejection as a situation in which “a person refuses the romantic advances of another, ignores / avoids or is repulsed by someone who is romantically interested in them, or unilaterally ends an existing relationship.” The measure of rejection is the “discrepancy between desired and perceived relational evaluation,” which is “the degree to which a person regards his or her relationship with another individual as valuable, important, or close”—in other words, you want your relationship to matter to the other person more than it does. Certain categories of people are more likely to be rejected: those considered “dangerous, having little to offer, as exploitative, or rejecting of us.” And the leading cause of rejection, they argue, is hypergamy: desiring people more desirable than oneself.

Most notably, they observe that “the culture has not provided them with good, effective scripts for rejecting love,” causing them to experience “a pervasive sense of scriptlessness.” Rejectors have their prefab lines (“It’s not you, it’s me,” “I’m not dating right now,” “We’re not a good match”), but rejects don’t. What is there to say, after all?

To whatever extent the mind is a part of nature, it too abhors a vacuum. Just as infatuation drives you to project intimate fantasies onto strangers, the blank slate of rejection, the lack of a script, invites you to devise an elaborate narrative about why you were rejected, and what that says about you. But even stronger than the temptation to dwell in the past (what might have happened) or dread the future (what won’t be) is the urge to wallow in an eternal present. Your life can’t move forward, so it moves sideways, to a parallel reality. At parties you imagine the date you didn’t bring, then go home to share your bed with a ghost. Absence becomes the realest thing in your world. So the true rejection plot is the one the reject devises in the absence of a plot.
    -The Rejection Plot (Tony Tulathimutte April 10, 2024, Paris Review)

[T]he story just started with the feeling of rejection. Rejection is a very intimate and isolating state. You don’t welcome condolence or reassurance, especially not from the person who rejected you, and often not even from your friends. So you’re alone with this condition that forces you to think about what you look like to other people, what they saw in you that caused them to reject you. You’re not likely to chalk it up to bad luck or fate unless you’re very mentally healthy. As a sort of ego-protective mechanism, you start creating this theory of the world and of other people that externalizes your own flaws.

What I wanted to hold onto was the idea that all the way up until the end, even as he commits this act of violence, he still considers himself an unimpeachable feminist. He believes he’s the true feminist and everybody has adopted this insincere bad-faith form of it, which explains why he’s not being rewarded for it.
    -INTERVIEW: Find Creative Inspiration From Your Vices: Tony Tulathimutte's "Rejection" is a short story collection about loners obsessing over rejection (Angela Hui, 9/19/24, Electric Lit)

This short story is most often mentioned in the same breath as Cat Person, which went viral around the same time, riding the #MeToo moment. The latter got a boost from the revelation that the author had borrowed from a real-life relationship, not her own. This one derives its notoriety from its portrayal of an incel on the road to violence, maybe the first, and probably still the best, in fiction.

The central character starts out as achingly politically-correct, having attended a formerly all-girl high school which:

ingrained in him, if not feminist values per se, the value of feminist values. It had been cool, or at least normal, to identify as asexual. And though he didn’t, he figured it was a better label than “virgin.” His friends, mostly female, told him he was refreshingly attentive and trustworthy for a boy. Meanwhile he is grateful for the knowledge that female was best used as an adjective, that sexism harms men too (though not nearly to the extent that it harms women), and that certain men pretend to be feminists just to get laid.

But, adopting these values turns out not to get him any girls either. His one sexual encounter proves unsuccessful and becomes such an isolated incident that he feels like he has reclaimed his virginity. He becomes increasingly reliant on domination porn, in which he fantasizes that the actresses are women he knows, and onanism. His one confidant is: “his QPOC agender friend from his college co-op, whom he’s always gotten along well with, in part because he’s never been attracted to them.” But eventually even they have had enough of his complaining:

All he’s doing is sharing some of these gripes at a picnic one afternoon when his QPOC agender friend asks him why he doesn’t just call that girl from high school he went on that date with? He replies that just because he wants to be in a relationship doesn’t mean he has to settle for a sociopath.

“See, you’re moving the goal posts,” his QPOC friend replies. “It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself when you keep redefining rejection, because you won’t let go of it. You refuse pity but crave it so much that you won’t admit how strongly you invite it.”

He says they’re being facile, though he knows their point is rather nuanced and specific, he just hasn’t considered it before, but he can’t walk it back now.

“I’m facile?” his friend says. “Nah, I’m tired. That’s what it is, I’m tired,” they say from behind their sunglasses, waving their mimosa. “I know you identify as a reject, I know that’s, like, your ‘brand,’ like it’s some unprecedented form of suffering that gives you secret wisdom. All this nonstop high-frequency whining, that’s what’s facile.”

He presses his lips shut while his brain feels like a swirling case of lottery balls, as his friend, pausing to hit a spliff, continues: “I mean, what the fuck do you want? Somehow you got a shit deal. Nobody knows why. Maybe it’s like you never really grappled with this shit because you thought you were exempt. But you refuse to change and are shocked when nothing changes. It’s not like you enjoy it, but you do enjoy pushing other people’s faces in it, that’s your main consolation. Weird how you’re always right about rejection, since nobody’s ever had it worse, nobody’s as pure and as wronged as you. Yo everyone! Check out the Woman Respecter! Last principled man right here! And that’s why you need it, because you get to convince yourself you’re being rejected for your virtue, not cause you’re a bummer. You’ve turned your loneliness into this, like, fetish necklace of martyrdom. And all of us,” they gesture around to other picnickers, “have to sit here and rubber-stamp your feminism. If we don’t indulge your wallowing, we’re being callous and, like, complicit with some diabolical global conspiracy that’s keeping you from getting laid. But if we do, then we’re ‘disingenuous’ because none of us will fuck you ourselves. Right? Am I right, everyone? Hands up, who agrees?”

The notoriety of the story is fully justified by what the author manages to achieve here: the reader fully agrees with the friend’s vivisection of this Identitarian victimology and can have little sympathy for such a pathological character, but we also recognize what a problem it is for society that we are producing such people. How are we arrived at a situation where someone who is this alienated from the community around them feels entitled to insist that others ought to behave differently toward them rather than recognizing that they need to change themselves? How did we manage to elevate victimhood to such a high status that folks can choose to glory in it and construct their identity around it rather than exercise some control over their own lives and stop being real or imagined victims?

This MAGA gothic tale may not be very pleasant but it will get under your skin and trouble your thoughts.

(Reviewed:28-Dec-24)

Grade: (A-) Orrin C. Judd

Tweet

Tony Tulathimutte Links:

    -WIKIPEDIA: Tony Tulathimutte
    -AUTHOR SITE: TonyTula.com
    -AUTHOR SITE: Crit: Your Final Writing Class
    -TWITTER: @tonytula
    -ENTRY: Tony Tulathimutte: 2017 Winner in Fiction (Whitting.org)
    -WIKIPEDIA: Rejection (short story collection)
    -ENTRY: Tony Tulathimutte (National Book Foundation)
    -ENTRY: Tony Tulathimutte (DBpedia)
    -INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte (Los Angeles Review of Books)
    -INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte (Believer)
    -REVIEW INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte (Kirkus)
    -INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte (BookForum)
    -INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte (AGNI)
    -INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte (Vice)
    -INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte
    -INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte (New Republic)
    -INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte (LitHub)
    -INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte (The Nation)
    -INDEX: Tony Tulathimutte (Paris Review)
    -STORY: The Feminist by Tony Tulathimutte (n+1, Fall 2019)
    -AUDIO: The Feminist by Tony Tulathimutte (n+1, Fall 2019)
    -
    -STORY: Technical Support by Tony Tulathimutte (n+1, Winter 2016)
    -STORY: Ahegao (Tony Tulathimutte, Winter 2023, Paris Review)
    -ESSAY: The Rejection Plot (Tony Tulathimutte April 10, 2024, Paris Review)
    -ESSAY: What Kind of Name Is That? (Tony Tulathimutte, December 26, 2016, Paris Review)
    -ESSAY: Title Fights: Who gets to name an author’s book? (Tony Tulathimutte, May 25, 2016, Paris Review)
    -ESSAY: Why There’s No ‘Millennial’ Novel (Tony Tulathimutte, Dec. 7th, 2016, NY Times Book Review)
    -ESSAY: The Curses, the Fates, the Races, the Fakes, the Faces, the Names of "The Game of Death"; or, The Game of Death (Tony Tulathimutte, American Reader)
    -ESSAY: January 17, 2016, Part I (Tony Tulathimutt, 1/18/16, Enormous Eye)
    -ESSAY: Good People Don’t Make Good Characters: Philip Roth taught the author Tony Tulathimutte that writers should aim to show all aspects of their subjects—not only the morally upstanding side. (Tony Tulathimutt, February 16, 2016, The Atlantic)
    -ESSAY: The Oscars Showed That People Think It’s Still Funny to Mock Asians (Tony Tulathimutte, March 1, 2016, Vice)
    -ESSAY: Photo Retouching Is the Digital Skincare That Equalizes Us All (Tony Tulathimutte, May 7, 2019, Vice)
    -ESSAY: Was Chris Farley Funny Because He Was Fat? (Tony Tulathimutte, August 6, 2015, Vice)
    -ESSAY: The New David Foster Wallace Movie Would Probably Make David Foster Wallace Really Uncomfortable (Tony Tulathimutte, August 3, 2015, Vice)
    -ESSAY: What Dylann Roof’s Desire to Ally With ‘Very Racist’ Asians Actually Means? (Tony Tulathimutte, June 24, 2015, Vice)
    -ESSAY: A Brief Look at the Weird Stuff Osama Bin Laden Was Reading Before He Was Killed,/a> (Tony Tulathimutte, May 20, 2015, Vice)
    -ESSAY: ‘East of Main Street: Taking the Lead’ Is a Refreshing Look at Asian-Americans in the Media (Tony Tulathimutte, May 8, 2015, Vice)
    -ESSAY: Agent Provocateur: Finding Representation for Your Book: How to find an agent? Try cocaine and yelling. JK (Tony Tulathimutte, Jul 12, 2017, Catapult)
    -ESSAY: Respawns and Recovery (Tony Tulathimutte, November 30th, 2018, Believer)
    -ESSAY: Proposals Toward the End of Writing (Tony Tulathimutte, February 9th, 2016, Believer)
    -ESSAY: Creeps (Tony Tulathimutte, October 16th, 2024, Feeld)
    -ESSAY: A Year in Reading: Tony Tulathimutte (Tony Tulathimutte, December 9, 2024, The Millions)
    -ESSAY: A Year in Reading: Tony Tulathimutte (Tony Tulathimutte, December 2, 2016, The Millions)
    -ESSAY: Clash Rules Everything Around Me: The true cost of Clash of Clans isn’t virtual gold but wasted time. Good riddance (Tony Tulathimutte, June 27, 2016, Real Life)
    -ESSAY: Stop blaming Iowa! MFA vs. NYC is a phony debate: The book world has a new phony debate. On the good side, at least we're not arguing about Franzen anymore (Tony Tulathimutte, March 6, 2014, Salon)
    -ESSAY: You Are What You Tweet (Tony Tulathimutte, September 3, 2013, The New Yorker)
    -ESSAY: Read This Very Short Story About Edible Panties: "I’d need to eat 14 to get my daily protein." (Tony Tulathimutte, July 14, 2017, Buzz Feeed News)
    -ESSAY: Tony Tulathimutte Always Eats His Vegetables “Having produce first thing in the morning licenses me to eat as bizarrely and violently as I want.” (Tony Tulathimutte, 11/01/24, Grub Street)
    -PLAYLIST: Tony Tulathimutte's Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Private Citizens: (Large Hearted Boy, 2/10/16)
    -DISCUSSION: Emily Witt and Tony Tulathimutte in conversation: A discussion of Health and Safety and Rejection (n+1, September 25, 2024)
    -DISCUSSION: Malcolm Harris in conversation with Tony Tulathimutte (Alex Woodend, October 31, 2017, BookForum)
    -INTERVIEW: Rebecca Rukeyser on Sleaze, Male Rot, and Writing a Horny Novel: Tony Tulathimutte Talks to the Author of The Seaplane on Final Approach (Tony Tulathimutte, June 27, 2022, LitHub)
    -REVIEW: Bad Times: Jenny Offill’s new novel of dread. (Tony Tulathimutte, March 16/23, 2020, The Nation) href="https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/sally-rooney-beautiful-world-where-are-you/">-REVIEW: Shock of the Old: Sally Rooney’s fiction for end times. (Tony Tulathimutte, October 18/25, 2021, The Nation)
    -REVIEW: Kristen Roupenian’s Power Dynamics: In her new book, the author of “Cat Person” tells stories of sadism, narcissism, and gore.: a review of You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories, (Tony Tulathimutte, January 8, 2019, New Republic)
    -REVIEW: Utopian Kink: Reports from the frontiers of sexual experimentation.: a review of Future Sex by Emily Witt (Tony Tulathimutte, October 4, 2016, New Republic)
    -REVIEW:Back to the Future: Don DeLillo’s techno-prophetic novel hungers for tradition: a review of Zero K (Tony Tulathimutte, April 27, 2016, New Republic)
    -REVIEW: Infornography: a review of Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda (Tony Tulathimutte, January 14, 2015, LA Review of Books)
    -
    -VIDEO: Uncanny Bodies: Carmen Maria Machado and Tony Tulathimutte (The Center for Fiction, 11/09/17)
    -VIDEO: Zaina Arafat with Tony Tulathimutte (HarvardBookStore, 7/20/20)
    -VIDEO: Shannon Sanders: Company w/ Tony Tulathimutte (Books Are Magic, 10/13/23)
    -
    -
    -PODCAST: 043: “The Feminist” by Tony Tulathimutte (Why is This Good?, 1 November 2020)
    -PODCAST: Ep. 138: Male Feminists, Cat People, and Society's Obsession With Dating (Escape From Plan A, Dec 15 2019)
    -PODCAST: Tony Tulathimutte (Other People with Brad Listi, 17 December 2024)
    -PODCAST: "Sell Your Tesla" with Tony Tulathimutte (You Should Probably Read More, 19 November 2024)
    -PODCAST: Episode 89: Weird Era feat. Tony Tulathimutte (Weird Era, 30 August 2024)
    -PODCAST: Completely Unconsoled: Tony Tulathimutte on Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine (Reading Writers, 27 March 2024)
    -PODCAST: 118: Tony Tulathimutte (Woodland Secrets, 22 July 2017)
    -PODCAST: Episode 210 - Tony Tulathimutte (The Virtual Memories Show, 20 March 2017)
    -PODCAST: Tony Tulathimutte on Book Reviews, Literary Omertà, Writing for Oneself, Attention Problems, Page Layout, and Permanence (Otherppl with Brad Listi, 7 June 2024)
    -PODCAST: Elizabeth McCracken, Tony Tulathimutte, Hadara Bar-Nadav, and Kathryn Nuernberger on MFA Programs (fiction/non-fiction, 4 October 2018, LitHub)
    -PODCAST: Ep 48: Tony Tulathimutte & Belinda McKeon (The Catapult, 15 February 2016)
    -PODCAST: Radio Hour: Sarah Bakewell, Tony Tulathimutte, and Andrea Kleine (LARB: Radio Hour, 28 April 2016)
    -PODCAST: The Sunday Read: ‘An Acerbic Young Writer Takes Aim at the Identity Era’ (NY Times: The Daily, 20 October 2024)
    -PODCAST: Ep. 16 - Rotten Asian American Characters (Unverified Accounts, 30 November 2020)
    -PODCAST: Is Diddy hip-hop's Weinstein? Plus, Brittany gets rejected (NPR: It’s Been a Minute, 20 September 2024)
    -PODCAST: Generation Why? (Ministry of Ideas, 4 January 2023)
    -
    -
    -PROFILE: Tony Tulathimutte and the Art of Cringe Fiction (Nina Palattella, Sept. 23, 2024, Kirkus)
    -PROFILE: An Acerbic Young Writer Takes Aim at the Identity Era (Giles Harvey, Sep. 13th, 2024, NY Times Magazine)
    -PROFILE: How to Give Neurotic Losers the Main Character Treatment (Jason Parham, Oct. 25th, 2024, Wired)
    -INTERVIEW:A Conversation With Tony Tulathimutte—Author of What Might Be the Best New Book About Modern Life (Megan Nolan, September 30, 2024, Vogue)
    -INTERVIEW: For Tony Tulathimutte Book Piles Are “Metaphysical Constructs”: The Author of “Rejection” Takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire (Literary Hub, September 17, 2024)
    -INTERVIEW: Surviving San Francisco: Race, Money, and the Neoliberal Tech-Bro: Gideon Lewis-Kraus Talks to Tony Tulathimutte About His Debut Novel (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, February 9, 2016, LitHub)

The conventional realist approach, I mean Cheever-Updike realism, is all about restraint and subtlety. My deal with this book was to go the other way and overindulge as much as possible, and part of that was to not pussyfoot around race. The way people usually try to ameliorate racism in mainstream narrative is to take a stereotype and just flip it around—so Harold and Kumar are stoners who get with hot women, Glenn is a brave and virtuous fighter who gets with a hot woman. Fresh Off the Boat is basically an Asian-American Leave it to Beaver. There’s a Mary Sue-ism to this approach that strikes me as both dishonest and equally beholden to cliché, whatever social benefit it may accomplish.

My attempt here is to inflate the stereotypes to their absolute limit, and yet still subvert them by making them intelligible in a social and psychological context, showing that whatever stereotypes exist are largely a matter of perception and are dwarfed by the complexities of individual character. It’s a big risk, because uncareful readers will just see the stereotypical qualities and immediately freak out. Philip Roth does it in Portnoy’s Complaint, Mary Gaitskill in Bad Behavior, Junot Diaz in his Yunior stories. All of them have been criticized for promoting stereotypes, when to me they’re doing the very opposite, on a higher level: they’re blowing apart the reductiveness of stereotype itself. I think what really pisses people off is that they also seem to be having fun doing it.

    -INTERVIEW: A Book About Rejection: PW Talks with Tony Tulathimutte (Sara Davis, Jul 19, 2024, Publishers Weekly)
    -INTERVIEW: Tony Tulathimutte by Anu Khosla: A comical novel on modern alienation told in seven interconnected stories. (Anu Khosla, September 17, 2024, Bomb)
    -INTERVIEW: Processing: How Tony Tulathimutte Wrote Rejection: The author on comic disproportion, revision, internet language, and pledging yourself to idiocy in fiction. (Lincoln Michel, Sep 17, 2024, Counter Craft)
    -INTERVIEW: Tony Tulathimutte (Kevin Zambrano, March 15, 2016, Full Stop)
    -INTERVIEW: Tony Tulathimutte: The Identity Game (Shelf Awareness: The Writer’s Life)
    -INTERVIEW: A Conversation with Tony Tulathimutte: The novelist and short story writer talks "Rejection" (Ross Barkan, Sep 08, 2024, Political Currents)
    -INTERVIEW: “Masturbatory Is a Compliment”: Tony Tulathimutte on Corniness and Rejection (Leah Abrams, September 17, 2024, Interview)
    -INTERVIEW: Pride and Spite: An Interview with Tony Tulathimutte (Bill Cheng, February 4, 2016, Tin House)
    -INTERVIEW: Reality Scooped: Talking with Tony Tulathimutte (Erica Berry, June 19, 2017, The Rumpus)
    -INTERVIEW: Book Brahmin: Tony Tulathimutte (Shelf Awareness, March 2, 2016)
    -INTERVIEW: Coddled, Sexting Millennials: Jennifer duBois Interviews Tony Tulathimutte (Jennifer duBois, February 9, 2016, American Short Fiction)
    -INTERVIEW: Self-Care: Talking to Tony Tulathimutte about Private Citizens (Molly McArdle, 3/11/16, BK Mag)
    -INTERVIEW: In Conversation: TONY TULATHIMUTTE (James Yu, October 2024, Brooklyn Rail)
    -INTERVIEW: Find Creative Inspiration From Your Vices: Tony Tulathimutte's "Rejection" is a short story collection about loners obsessing over rejection (Angela Hui, 9/19/24, Electric Lit)
    -INTERVIEW: Exploring the underrated sorrows of rejection with Tony Tulathimutte (Interview by Nirica Srinivasan, 9/26/24, Interlocutor)
    -PROFILE: A Writer to Watch: Tony Tulathimutte (Stanford Magazine, July/August 2017)
    -INTERVIEW: Episode XVII: "Most people who hate my book hate it for some combination of three reasons" (Thick Skin, 12/19/16)
    -INTERVIEW: On adapting to distraction and uncertainty: Writer and teacher Tony Tulathimutte discusses forming his own writing class from home, writing the internet, and letting distraction feed back into your writing. (The Creative Independent)
    -INTERVIEW: Seriously Questioning… Tony Tulathimutte (Charles Arrowsmith, March 28, 2017, House of Speak Easy)
    -INTERVIEW: Q&A with Tony Tulathimutte (Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, March 30, 2016)
    -INTERVIEW: Tony’s Fictional Planet:: An Interview with Tony Tulathimutte (Alicia Lawrence, The Malahat Review)
    -INTERVIEW: Origin Story: Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens (David Busis, February 10, 2016, Ploughshares)
    -INTERVIEW: An Interview with Tony Tulathimutte (West 10th)
    -INTERVIEW: Like Showing a Stranger your Self-inflicted Bruises: Tony Tulathimutte on Life after Winning our 2010 Novella Prize (Heike Lettrari, The Mahabarat Review)
    -INTERVIEW: How to Have Fun Destroying Yourself: An Interview with Tony Tulathimutte, Author of Private Citizens,/a> (David Busis, 2/11/16, Electric Lit)
    -
    -ESSAY: When Male Writers Confront Toxic Masculinity: It's easier than ever for men to speak the language of feminism. It's harder to act like they mean it (Philip Sayers, Jan. 23, 2020, The Walrus)
    -ESSAY: Aftermath (Miri, April 13, 2024, Small wire)
    -ESSAY: When Reason Fails : The Literature of Mass Shootings (Sam Kriss, Oct. 18th, 2022, Point)
    -
    -
    -REVIEW INDEX: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (BookMarks)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Dwight Garner, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Publishers Weekly)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Cat Zhang, The Cut)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Jess Bergman, New Republic)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Christian Lorentzen, BookForum)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Kirkus)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Matthew keeley, Boston Globe)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Sam Sacks, WSJ)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Madeline Leung Coleman, Vulture)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Thane Tierney, BookPage
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Alexander moran, BookList)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Jane Hu, Washington Post)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Chris Jesu Lee, Salieri Redemption)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Harris Sockel, Pirate Wires)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Sam Franzini, Our Culture)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Adam Pearson, Adam’s Substack)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Tony’s Book World)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Opus Vei)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (david Marler)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Ben Arzate, the feel bad dispatch)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Mike Jeffrey, LA Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (The New Dork Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Turn & Work)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Lisa Butts, BookBrowse)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (Terry Nguyen, Dirt)
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (
    -REVIEW: of Rejection (
    -REVIEW INDEX: Private Citizens byTtony Tulathimutte (BookMarks)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Larissa Pham, the Nation)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Publishers Weekly)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Christian Lorentzen, Vulture)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (James Yu, Vice)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Sarah Nicole Prickett, BookForum)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Manuel Gonzalez, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Maddie Crum, Huffington Post)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Kirkus)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Sarah Ditum, The Guardian)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Luke Brown, Financial Times)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Chris Jesu Lee, Salieri Redemption)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Leilani Clark, KQED)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Andrew Irwin, TLS)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Bari Weiss, WSJ)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (The Masters Review)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Jude Cook, Literary Review)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Angry Doodler, seattle Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Roisin Kiberd, Totally Dublin)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Tim Jones, NDR Mag)
    -REVIEW: of Private Citizens (Susan Osborne, a life in books)

Book-related and General Links:

    -ESSAY: The incel trap: Angry and lonely young men can easily enter a web of hatred against women online. Is there a way out? (Emily Lawford, September 21, 2024, Prospect)
    -