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    Private Citizens
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    Private Citizens
    Unavailable
    Private Citizens
    Audiobook12 hours

    Private Citizens

    Written by Tony Tulathimutte

    Narrated by Pete Cross

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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. The story’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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateFeb 9, 2016
    ISBN9781520000381
    Unavailable
    Private Citizens
    Author

    Tony Tulathimutte

    Tony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens and Rejection. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, n +1, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times. The recipient of an O. Henry Award and a Whiting Award, he runs the writing class CRIT in Brooklyn. 

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    Reviews for Private Citizens

    4/5

    5 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book was chosen because it had good reviews and being older I like to delve into millennial's lives. This book loosely follows 4 Stanford students that came together in college and are now out in the hyper Bay Area. The writer is very creative and shows great knowledge but the book has way too many long narratives that show the writer's skill but add nothing to the book. Editing would have greatly helped. The characters seem caricatures unless there are really people like this. They were not very likable which is not a problem but it did make the book less interesting. They were definitely into themselves. I am really not clear why this book was so well received but it didn't work for me.
    • 4/5
      These days, it seems like it's a rite of passage to go through the just-graduated-and-I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-doing, trying to discern out who you really are and what you really want to do time, usually not too long after graduating from college. Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens is about that exact time in the lives of four people. Confused social activist Cory, insecure tech worker Will, unstable grad student Henrik and self-destructive wannabe writer Linda all knew each other at Stanford and live in and around tech-boom San Francisco, and the story follows each of them in turn as they try to figure out the obstacles in front of them: Cory's inheritance of a flailing nonprofit, Will's inability to cope with his hyperambitious, emotionally withholding girlfriend Vanya, Henrick's loss of funding for his research and recurrence of bipolar disorder, and Linda's drug issues and infatuation with her own perceived genius. They're not friends anymore, per se, more like people whose lives intertwined in college as roommates or in ill-fated relationships, and never came completely apart. And as their lives get more complicated and harder, they find themselves coming back together.Both Tulathimutte's characterizations and grasp on the thorny knot it can be to be a millennial are strong and ring true. Cory and Will and Henrik and Linda all feel like real, if highly magnified, people. None of them are especially likable, but all of them can be sympathetic. They're all experiencing the fuzzy mess of trying to check your privilege, of trying to find the right boundaries between your online life and your real one, figuring out your own niche in a crowded world, living up to the praise and expectations you've been inundated with for your whole life. It's trendy to dismiss millennial malaise as a bunch of whining from spoiled brats, but Tulathimutte understands that it isn't that simple. We were raised to believe that you earn a medal just for showing up, that you can be anything you want to be...and when it turns out that your life isn't particularly special, you can't shake the feeling that it's your fault, somehow, that you've failed yourself and wasted your potential. The writing is maybe a little heavy on esoteric word choices, but it's sharp and incisive and compelling. I'm not sure how I felt about the end, though...it felt like a bit of a departure from the rest of the book, at least in part. But maybe when I read it again (and I plan to), knowing how it winds up, it'll fit more cohesively.