“Finally, Millennial Heroes and Heroines in a Great American Novel.”
"One of the really phenomenal novels I’ve read in the last decade" —Jonathan Franzen
"Excellent" —TIME Magazine
"Breathtakingly smart and sharp" —Glamour UK
"Classically good" —The Atlantic
"Bracingly smart" —The Guardian
"Brilliant" —Buzzfeed
"Hilarious" —The Paris Review
Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel’s four whip-smart narrators—idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda—are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again.
A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.
PRAISE FOR PRIVATE CITIZENS
“Tulathimutte has begun the essential work of identifying the century’s new forms of vanity and pain. That he’s relentlessly funny in doing so marks him as a genuine talent.”
“He tackles the 21st century social novel armed with tremendous verve, an unsparing eye, and formidable skill.”
“I suspect in about 15 years, the young American novelist Tony Tulathimutte will start winning huge literary awards, but in the meantime, I recommend reading Private Citizens, his bracingly smart first novel”
“Skillfully showing the best and worst of young adulthood.”
“Poetic and verbose… an impressive start for an edgy new writer.”
“Tony Tulathimutte’s brilliant debut novel is hilarious and heartbreaking all at once”
“Private Citizens is as funny as it is terrifyingly smart.”
“This season, my literary accessory of choice is Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens.”
“Private Citizens succeeds on the charm of its verisimilitude and the brilliance of its observations.”
“[A] thrillingly sceptical vision of the noughties.”
“Tulathimutte has written a wonderfully hilarious novel, full of heart and brutal truths, about privilege and failure and what it means to be friends in the 21st century. This book is going to win awards.”
“Private Citizens is contemporary satire that bristles with energy and inventiveness, skewering the foibles of today’s youth with surprising depth and sophistication.”
“Here is a writer of ideas and character and a master of plotting and humor.”
“Tulathimutte captures both the humour and aches of this generation within the lives of digitally entrenched, sexually liberated, and politically woke 20-somethings.”
“Tony Tulathimutte writes sentences with a reckless verve that reminds one of the best of David Foster Wallace. He’s a major American talent.”
“Witty, unsparing, and unsettlingly precise... A satirical portrait of privilege and disappointment with striking emotional depth.”
“Tulathimutte examines and flays his characters with equal parts OTT clarity and wise-ass humor.”
“A lively set of misadventures populated with a cast possessed of a rare humanity, acquired at enormous cost.”
“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.”
“[Tulathimutte] is a really good writer. He’s really funny, his sentences are fantastic.”
“Tony Tulathimutte is a virtuoso of words”
“Tulathimutte transcends the easy potshots at millennial sanctimony to capture the sincerity of his protagonists’ friendship.”
“Tony Tulathimutte’s brilliantly well-told story of four friends who are trying to become adults in tech-addled late-aughts San Francisco is somehow both unsparingly cruel and compassionate in equal measure. His protagonists struggle against the worst in their culture and themselves in a way that is sad, funny, and infinitely relatable.”
“Private Citizens is a freak of literature—a novel so authentic, hilarious, elegantly plotted, and heartbreaking that I’d follow it anywhere.”
“Rabidly intelligent, subversive, and heartfelt, Private Citizens is a comedy, a love story, and a horrifyingly adept critique of life in the digital age.”
“The book is an uncanny mirror. If you’re an aspiring writer, a do-gooder, an Interneteer, or a human with a reasonable amount of despair, you might flush with recognition.”
“Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens is my favorite kind of novel: an entrancing narrative in which important ideas lurk around the corners and behind the curtains.”
“An eloquent social novel bristling with logic.”
“Tulathimutte is a literary acrobat… he has everything it takes to become a great American novelist.”
“Hotshot newcomer Tulathimutte’s writing is breathtakingly smart and sharp, and somehow you end up rooting for these flawed, self-obsessed twenty-somethings.”
“To the dismay of olds everywhere, it may well be time that we start asking whose writing will populate the ‘millennial canon.’ Tony Tulathimutte’s debut novel, Private Citizens, is the answer to that question.”
“[A] hilarious portrait of youthful self-centeredness.”
“A funny, unflinching portrayal of young people today, nasty neuroses and all.”
“Tulathimutte’s accomplished, witty, often hilarious debut transforms the Bay Area into a Balzacian microcosm that seems to contain every germ of contemporary American life and youth.”
“Tulathimutte writes like he’s tossing firecrackers: quick and brutal bursts of language and narrative.”
“Private Citizens works so well because there’s a realness to everything the characters experience.”
“An amazing book about San Francisco. It’s the best book I’ve read about internet culture, so I love it. It’s a great, funny novel.”
“Private Citizens is a combustible combination of acrobatic language, dead-on observations and hilarious, heartbreaking storytelling.”
“A hilarious and gutsy novel... Tony Tulathimutte’s satire cuts deep, but has a tender belly—and this book will leave you raw with feeling and aching at the ribs.”
“Private Citizens is the product of a whirring intellect with brilliance to burn.”