Tony Tulathimutte is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, VICE, N+1, Playboy, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Whiting Award in Fiction. His novel Private Citizens was published by William Morrow in 2016, and was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and Buzzfeed, among others. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Private CitizensA Novel
After a sleepless sexless night, Henrik asked Lucretia over muesli where the nearest pharmacy was. She made her worst face and asked why. He said he needed prescriptions filled—at this, she became a flurry of snorts and book recommendations, declaring that Western medical institutions profited by aggravating illness; Big Pharma was a cartel, doctors were pushers, patients were junkies. She asked to see what he was taking, and when she laid eyes on his briefcase-size pill case, she looked like he’d just told her he was born without a heart. She made him lie down, and sent up gasps researching his prescriptions on her naturopathic reference sites. He wasn’t disordered, she assured him; society was. Manic conservatives, depressive liberals. Mood-swinging markets and a demented climate. Rich against poor, white against unwhite. Henrik was just American.
Private Citizens:A Novel -
Private CitizensA Novel
Will sneered at his photogenic omelet, which somehow symbolized Vanya’s firm, broad, unambiguous selfhood. Through years of personal optimization testing and strength-finding, she reckoned herself a Type A Left-Brain ESTP Post-Wave Feminist True-Cost Social Capitalist Progressive Independent Compatibilist Challenger Mahayana Buddhist Straight Mono Switch Femme; a Carrie, an Aries, and a Ravenclaw. Last year she’d had her DNA sequenced and found she was part Polish. In this galaxy of metrics Vanya had rigorously defined herself. You’re more than that, Will wanted to say; but could he insist she was more complex than she said she was?
Private Citizens:A Novel -
Private CitizensA Novel
Instead she tried a fiction writing workshop, where, in spite of its idiotic mission of focus-grouping literature, she could at least set her own agenda. But she quickly wearied of her classmates’ manuscripts, about characters with pounding hearts and wry grins who’d sigh and shrug and fail to meet her gaze, who held dying grandmothers’ hands, helmed starships, attended dorm parties, came out. They were so serious about it! And they got foot rubs of praise, the bland reading the bland—products of a contemporary literature rife with domestic angst, ethnic tourism, child prodigies, talking animals, period nostalgia, affected affectlessness, atrocity porn, genre crossovers clad in fig leaves of literary technique. No ideas, only intellectual property; no avant-garde, only controversy; no ars poetica, only personal essays; no major writers, only writing majors.
Private Citizens:A Novel
“Tony Tulathimutte’s brilliant debut novel is hilarious and heartbreaking all at once—a spot-on, satifical portrait of modern San Francisco and the privilege that inhabits it . . . Brimming with wit and heart, Private Citizens is an impressive debut from a sharp new voice.” —Buzzfeed
"The setup is practically foolproof, but that shouldn't discount Tulathimutte's talent for comedy. A funny situation doesn't always lead to funny writing, and Tulathimutte frequently proves his ability to nurse laughs even from dire, awkward, uncomfortable situations, not just from explicitly amusing ones. Tulathimutte's niftiest feat, though, is his ability to subtly shift the reader's laughter from the kind engendered by a sense of superiority to the kind built on recognition . . . [Private Citizens] is a comedy . . . that is, in all respects, emotionally engaging and more than satisfying." —Manuel Gonzales, The New York Times Book Review
"The first great millennial novel." —New York magazine [on Private Citizens]
Selected Works
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In the work of Tony Tulathimutte, every sentence must be a story all its own…and it’s got to sing. He tackles the 21st century social novel armed with tremendous verve, an unsparing eye, and formidable skill. Reeling from scene to vibrant scene, his portrait of four recent Stanford grads adrift in the Bay Area is scathingly funny and unexpectedly anguished; it charts the ways in which technology and critical theory have intensified his generation’s self-consciousness to a nearly unbearable degree. What might merely be an achingly hilarious skewering builds to a vision of devastation, though his pessimism is tempered by understanding. It is a dazzling debut.