The poor souls in the National Book Award long-listed Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte's thrilling collection of seven interrelated stories, encounter nonacceptance in various painful forms. The self-described feminist of "The Feminist" assumes women keep rejecting a catch like him, with his "academic achievement in his Gender Studies major," because he's narrow-shouldered, "the most oppressed subaltern group." A 20-something woman in "Pics" has a one-night fling with a longtime friend who possesses "an era-definingly huge dick." When he rejects her, she gripes about the injustice with the women in her group chat.
Think that's explicit? Hang on, because it gets even more daring, starting with "Ahegao, or the Ballad of Sexual Repression," in which Kant, a gay Thai American virgin in his early 30s, begins his quest to "build his résumé" and find guys to have sex with, a pursuit complicated by unusual proclivities. Online culture, sexuality, allyship, and more come in for scrutiny, much of it hilarious, all of it unsettling. With Rejection, Tulathimutte (Private Citizens) has written one of the most brilliantly funny works of fiction since Paul Beatty's The Sellout. Reject it at one's peril. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer