Could be the year’s feel-bad book, but Tulathimutte’s inventiveness, his intellect, his sense of humor, and his precise style make his characters’ mortifications a pleasure to read ... Caustic, clever, funny, and humane.
Startlingly good ... Tulathimutte is devastatingly fluent in all modes of current slang, social-justice buzzwords and the recondite phraseology of the terminally online. There’s a volatile thrill to the writing that owes to the electricity of the language but also to the collision of extreme registers. The psychic torment of these characters can be as disturbing as graphic horror stories; it can also be snortingly funny.
Sounds unbearable, a human centipede of misery crossed with a brain worm becoming an Ouroboros. And yet it works. And it’s funny ... This frantic anticipation of critique would be so annoying if it wasn’t also so smart. Turns out blue balls can kill a guy. They can also make a really good story.
This book is so cold and lonely you could hang meat in it ... I read Rejection during a week when I felt down, and it almost stubbed me out, like a cigarette ... But Tulathimutte is such an acutely observant writer that I was entranced by his book despite its narrowness and emotional barbarity ... He’s tanked up, bleakly funny and always stropping his knife ... Tulathimutte’s writing about these matters is sophisticated, circumspect, impossible to pin down. He’s an elusive anatomist of culture-war provocations ... This book is not for everyone. I’m not sure it’s for me. But I’ve scraped myself up off the floor to be able to write: Tulathimutte is a big talent and he is clearly just getting started.
The characters, ideas, and symbols echo across the stories, and these metatextual layers—along with the layers of internet lore and memes—create a hilariously brazen and existentially unsettling portrait of modern life, love, and identity. An inventive and shameless story collection for the chronically online.
Shrewd ... The prose is consistently sharp and funny as Tulathimutte cuts to the truth of his characters’ dilemmas. It’s a first-rate exploration of yearning and solitude.