Critics' Opinion:
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Published Feb 2016
384 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition, and friendship in millennial San Francisco. With the social acuity of Adelle Waldman and the murderous wit of Martin Amis, Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens is a brainy, irreverent debut - This Side of Paradise for a new era.
Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. 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 humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area's maze of tech startups, 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.
"Starred Review. [A] razor-sharp debut...Witty, unsparing, and unsettlingly precise, Tulathimutte empathizes with his subjects even as he (brilliantly) skewers them. A satirical portrait of privilege and disappointment with striking emotional depth." - Kirkus
"Tulathimutte's debut is poetic and verbose...an impressive start for an edgy new writer." - Booklist
"Private Citizens is the product of a whirring intellect with brilliance to burn...Reading Tony Tulathimutte is like watching a mad genius at work in his laboratory, conjuring the magnificent and the monstrous into life." - Anthony Marra, New York Times-bestselling author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
"Private Citizens is a freak of literature - a novel so authentic, hilarious, elegantly plotted, and heartbreaking that I'd follow it anywhere. Tony Tulathimutte is a singular intellect with an uncanny 40/20 vision on the world." - Jennifer duBois, author of Cartwheel and A Partial History of Lost Causes
This information about Private Citizens was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tony Tulathimutte has written for VICE, N+1, AGNI, Salon, The New Yorker online, Threepenny Review, and others. He is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has received an O. Henry Award, a Truman Capote fellowship, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award.
Formerly he worked as a UX consultant in San Francisco, co-authoring a book of research methods. His website is at tonytula.com.
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