The key ideas

Rejection

Tony Tulathimutte, 2024

A narrow-shouldered guy politely accepts every rejection and then sends long emails after it. A woman keeps the only explicit photo with her best friend in an album called “loser”. A shy man writes, for the first time, about what he really wants. An entrepreneur promises a woman a future of five billion descendants. And someone called Bee poses as thousands of people at once. Seven linked stories by Tony Tulathimutte about what people do when they hear “no”.

Who it is for

For readers of contemporary fiction who aren't afraid of uncomfortable subjects. For anyone who spends too much time online and wants to see it from the outside. For everyone who has ever been rejected.

Discourse is loneliness disguised as war.

A Real Date

Night in a college dorm. A narrow-shouldered guy is already on his way out of his friend's room when he suddenly hears his own voice, casual and calm. He likes her. Maybe they could go on a date sometime, a real one?

She says “Oh” and explains at length: she doesn't want to risk the good thing they have. He rushes to reassure her, jokes about the friend zone, and they laugh and hug.

Back in his room he lies down, sighs, gets up and writes her a long email. An hour later, a second one. A day later, still without a reply, a third.

So begins Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, a book of linked stories in which almost everyone reaches out to other people and hears “no”.

The Feminist

At school he was one of five boys: a private girls' school had gone co-ed shortly before he enrolled. His friends told him he was unusually attentive for a boy.

In college the dorm scene repeats four or five more times, with other girls. On a dating site he crops his shoulders out of his photos. One woman leaves their date while he is in the bathroom.

At thirty-one he asks the girl he rejected in high school out to a bar. On her third whiskey she slaps a stranger's pool cue to the floor when it comes too close to her face. He asks if he can kiss her. She says, “Uh, no.” He asks why. She shoves him to the ground and cracks up: “Oh my god, are you wearing shoulder pads?”

At a picnic his agender friend gets tired of listening to him, and later, under the handle @madonnaharaway, posts about men who shout about their feminism to get power over women. Then steroids. After forty he kicks a stroller on the sidewalk and runs off laughing. Then illness, and forums for narrow-shouldered men, where he is a moderator. A twenty-three-year-old newcomer writes to the forum: “You're making it worse.” He answers with an enormous post about how women stole their lives. No reply. Words, he decides, are worth nothing without action.

A few weeks later he is standing in the vestibule of what used to be his favorite restaurant. A young woman in a yellow ruffled blouse walks in after him. He holds the door for her, she thanks him, he nods politely. Then he pulls on a ski mask, slides his backpack off his narrow shoulders and follows her.

Read in Livria

About the author

Tony Tulathimutte is a Thai American writer, the author of the novel Private Citizens (2016) and the collection Rejection (2024). His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, The Nation and The New York Times. He has won an O. Henry Award and a Whiting Award. In Brooklyn he runs CRIT, a writing class.

All books by this author: Tony Tulathimutte

Terms from the book

  • friend zone: The position of someone whose crush offers them only friendship. The hero's agender friend calls the idea a sexist ploy that lets unlucky men blame women for their own unattractiveness.
  • agender: An agender person doesn't identify with any gender. This is how the hero's friend in the first story describes themselves.
  • coming out: Openly telling people about your sexual orientation or gender identity. Kant does it in a single email sent to friends, family and colleagues.
  • ahegao: A facial expression from Japanese anime and manga: eyes rolled up and crossed, tongue hanging out. Kant asks Julian to make it.
  • omakase: A Japanese meal where the chef chooses every dish. Max takes Alison to a two-hundred-dollar omakase.
  • blackpill: Online slang: the hopeless belief that nothing can help a lonely man anymore and that women are to blame for it.
  • shitpost: A deliberately pointless post made for laughs. Bee thinks it is the best thing the internet has: self-expression minus the self.
  • Botgate: A fictional internet scandal from the story “Main Character”: thousands of accounts that may all be run by one person.

All terms

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