India, Sept. 4 -- Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection is a novel-in-stories about people fluent in failure - not the kind you overcome, but the kind that folds into your posture, shapes your voice, and acts as proof of having tried; not to be exceptional, but to avoid being a failure - only to fail anyway. These hyper-articulate, painfully self-aware people, fluent in guilt, shame, theory, and therapy, come together to form a book that is fiercely intelligent, emotionally precise, and painfully, sometimes hilariously, accurate.

Jane Austen dismantled marriage plots, Charles Dickens tore into the ugly side of the Industrial Revolution, and Tolstoy questioned everything from religion to romantic ideals. Woolf, Orwell, Huxley, and Hemingway each ...