Tony Tulathimuttes writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The American Reader, Cimarron Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He has received an O. Henry Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, a Jentel Arts Fellowship, a Truman Capote Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. He works in New York.
Still Life (2024) Katherine Packert Burke "Do you filter absolutely everything through art? Are you worried that one specific person in your past has messed you up permanently? Can you often be found thinking WILL I ALWAYS BE THIS WAY??? If so, you might be me, and this book is for the both of us. Katherine Packert Burke is both wise and clever, ironic and not, and with Still Life makes the autofiction snake devour its own tail and go back for seconds."
The Expat (2024) Hansen Shi "The Expat is, for starters, a first-rate novel of modern spycraft, complete with honeypots, dark web recruiters, triple agents, and international proxy wars. But it's also a brilliant novel about a certain brand of Asian-American thwartedness--how the thirst for recognition can make you vulnerable to your own self-mythology, and how people who are denied visibility may exploit their invisibility. Like a Tesla, The Expat is sleek, fast, and unexpectedly deadly, and Hansen Shi's talent is so giant that it's a bit suspicious... I wonder who he's working for?"
Worry (2024) Alexandra Tanner "Worry is an excellent, excellent comic novel, a proper laugh-until-you-cough onslaught of horrible manners, toxic relatives, internet vomit, and hilariously maimed pets. I've spent my whole life desperately trying not to say the stuff that comes out of these characters' mouths. A book that's impossible to read without annoying your friends with constant quotations. But who needs friends when you've got this book?"
The Book of Ayn (2023) Lexi Freiman "Infuriating, perverse, contrarian, scandalous, nihilistic, and very, very funny."
The Last Language (2023) Jennifer duBois "The Last Language is, depending on how you read it, a tragic romance, a manic chronicle of self-deception, or a knife fight with Nabokov - in any case it's a masterpiece. No one writes with more care and less pity than Jennifer duBois, whose depth of knowledge and insight into other people's minds is boundless."
Company (2023) Shannon Sanders "Company is a story collection that eats like a novel. Each story feels like a completely different vision of the same majestically sprawling family, as these neurotic high achievers struggle to balance the duties of kinship, social appearances, and honesty to their true selves. Reading Shannon Sanders makes me want to visit home."
How I Won a Nobel Prize (2023) Julius Taranto "An indisputably brilliant comic novel of ideas, a feat of deep research and Olympian satire worthy of Don DeLillo. Julius Taranto confidently grasps the third rail of cancel culture and ties it into a balloon animal, with great nerve and heart (to say nothing of phlegm, bile, and blood - in other words, humor). Reading this book is like doing a whippit that makes you smarter."
The Glow (2023) Jessie Gaynor "The Glow is the first truly dead-on satire of wellness culture, understanding it as not just a consumer trend, but a way of thinking and speaking. With terrifying wit, Jessie Gaynor shreds the overrated virtues of prosperity and healthy moisture barriers, and extols the underrated virtues of irony and sanity."
The Seaplane on Final Approach (2022) Rebecca Rukeyser "Brilliant and possibly the horniest thing I've ever read. But this is Advanced Horniness, the kind that can see the sex in phone book listings, vicarious jealousy, five thousand dollars, and the cold devouring ocean. It's as if Muriel Spark got seasick and dropped molly instead of dramamine."
The Immortal King Rao (2022) Vauhini Vara "The Immortal King Rao is an odyssey of the grandest scale, spanning over half a century and charting a Dalit immigrant's rise to world power. Vauhini Vara fuses intricate family lore with the history of tech solutionism and capitalist demagoguery, pointing forward to a dangerously likely future of corporate dominion; she writes with the meticulous clarity of a longform journalist, the explosive force of a Trident missile, and the ambition of her own brilliant protagonists."
The Body Scout (2021) Lincoln Michel "The Body Scout is like a sci-fi detective novel that a sci-fi detective would write. Like the hybrids and cyborgs who fill this book, Lincoln Michel has the restless brain of Philip K. Dick, the bloodshot eyes of David Cronenberg, the tongue of William Gibson, and a beating heart ripped straight from Raymond Chandler's chest."
You Exist Too Much (2020) Zaina Arafat "You Exist Too Much gets desire at a deep level: where it comes from, how it pushes and tugs, and how it's virtually never just about who it's about. As the narrator pinballs from one disastrous affair to the next, we get more than the chronicle of a young full-blown love addict, but a keen study in how our wants are bound to place, race, gender, religion, psychology, and family. Zaina Arafat speaks for the persistently hungry."
Barker House (2020) David Moloney "At a time when mass incarceration is increasingly a feature of American life, David Moloney's Barker House is a great and important book. Without romanticizing, demonizing, or candy-coating the work of his corrections officers, this novel-in-stories offers an experienced insider's view of their lives, in stainless-steely prose that easily matches the best of Raymond Carver and John Fante."
New Waves (2020) Kevin Nguyen "Kevin Nguyen's New Waves collapses every tired distinction about the internet. In this novel of relationships, race, and loss, everything is both permanent and ephemeral--technology both preserves and buries culture, and the people who ghost you can also haunt you. With his swift, funny, and merciless prose, Nguyen smartly dissects how life online may be digital, but it's far from binary."
