Rejection

Tulathimutte's linked story collection uses rejection, romantic, sexual, professional, ideological, as a single lens across seven interlocking narrators, several of whom recur or collide across stories in ways that sharpen the book's cumulative cruelty. The satire is aimed squarely at extremely online forms of self-justification: incel forums, callout culture, performative allyship, and Tulathimutte is unsparing about how these postures curdle into self-delusion. What keeps the book from being simply mean is the precision of its ear, the specific cadences of the communities it's mocking, which makes the humor land even as the emotional temperature stays deliberately, almost punishingly cold. It's a hard book to feel warmly toward, and that seems to be exactly what it wants.