Private Citizens
From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition and friendship - dubbed ‘the first great millennial novel’ by New York Magazine.
'A brilliant novel – whip smart, hilarious and entirely engrossing' Emma Cline, author of The Girls
'Tulathimutte is a big talent' Jonathan Franzen, author of Purity
'An eloquent social novel bristling with logic’ Nell Zink, Financial Times, Best Summer Books of 2016
'Tulathimutte is a pervert and a madman and a stone-cold genius’ Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
'Tulathimutte is utterly inimitable.' Raven Leilani, author of Luster
'Tulathimutte, undoubtedly one of the foremost fiction writers of his generation, is virtuosic, in the realm of the greats.’ Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the noughties, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century. Call it a gleefully rude comedy of manners, a Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel's four whip-smart narrators – idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda – are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humour and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area's maze of tech start-ups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other's lives once again.
A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.
*A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 – SELECTED BY JONATHAN FRANZEN*
Tony Tulathimutte is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he has written for the New York Times, VICE, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Believer, N+1, Playboy, The Paris Review, The LA Review of Books, and others. His work has received an O. Henry Award and a Macdowell Fellowship, and he’s appeared as a guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers. He lives in New York.
Follow Tony on Twitter @tonytula
www.tonytula.com