Rejection
Tony Tulathimutte
In 2019, the Brooklyn-based literary magazine n+1 published a short story that went viral. Titled The Feminist, it follows the life of a man who turns from a bell hooks-reading Supporter of Women into a bitter moderator in an online forum about how feminism is a cancer. Rejection has hardened him over the years.
Now, half a decade later, The Feminist and six other short stories have been gathered in an interlinked collection. The Feminist now feels like a prescient prequel to our current moment, while Rejection’s other stories take aim at wider subjects, following a range of characters: a woman who self-destructs after being romantically rejected; a man who comes out as gay, but really it’s his sadism he’s reckoning with; a disaffected Twitter addict who refuses all attempts to define them according to race, gender, and sexuality: they want to live beyond identity, that tiresome predominant organising category of our era.
What makes the stories so readable – what made The Feminist such a hit – is Tulathimutte’s magnetic prose, at once entertaining and acute. In fact, Rejection feels like being inside the internet. At times it mimics the language of twentysomething online spaces (of a disappointing man: “we hate him now yes? typical venus in sag”). More broadly, the stories capture the spirit of our doomscrolling age: the paranoia, the dread, the defensiveness and resentment that has curdled into political death spirals everywhere. Rebecca Liu
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