Click here to buy this shirt: https://aaronshirt.com/product/rezn-chicago-at-the-emptybottle-dec-13-14-2024-tour-t-shirts/ When I started reading Tony Tulathimutte’s “Ahegao” late last year, I didn’t expect to finish it in utter horror. I rarely laugh or cry out loud when reading fiction these days, my aging adult heart immune to the physical convulsions literature could induce when I was a teenager. But there I was, howling as if I were at a wrestling match rather than reading literary fiction in The Paris Review. I may not have anticipated the physical reactions, but I knew he was the real deal. I had admired and enjoyed his 2016 debut novel, Private Citizens, a funny and accurate satire about post-college millennials in mid-2000s San Francisco that was widely praised, including by the likes of Jonathan Franzen. Reading Private Citizens, I was struck by Tulathimutte's unusual and deft skill at combining masterful wit with a specific, precise, and self-conscious kind of humor that at times left me wriggling.
If that quality was present in his debut, it is evident in his long-awaited follow-up, Rejection, a novel told in seven stories—including “Ahegao”—about Kant, a “virgin Asian porn-addict in his mid-30s” who lacks sex appeal and luck but has a penchant for creative sadism. The stories are linked thematically and sometimes through recurring characters. Rejection was published on