“Scathing, upsetting and generous all at once, this novel, about millennial friends in pre-2008-crash San Francisco, thrums with Tulathimutte’s sly intelligence and unerring comic timing. . . . The warm flashes make the satire cut deeper.” — The New York Times , “The Funniest Novels Since Catch-22 ”  "One of the really phenomenal novels I've read in the last decade." —Jonathan Franzen From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition, and friendship in millennial San Francisco. With the social acuity of Adelle Waldman and the murderous wit of Martin Amis, Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens is a brainy, irreverent debut— This Side of Paradise for a new era. 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. “The first great millennial novel.” — New York magazine “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.” — Village Voice “[A] hilarious portrait of youthful self-centeredness.” — The Paris Review “This season, my literary accessory choice is Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens.” — Vogue “A funny, unflinching portrayal of young people today, nasty neuroses and all." — Huffington Post “Private Citizens succeeds on the charm of its verisimilitude and the brilliance of its observations.” — SF Weekly “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.” — Flavorwire “We know millennials as bogeychildren of alarmist trend pieces and the catchall hand-wringing of an aging commentariat. Tulathimutte is on the front line of writers showing that they’re also worthy heroes and heroines of the American novel.” — Vulture “Tony Tulathimutte’s brilliant debut novel is hilarious and heartbreaking all at once--a spot-on, satifical portrait of modern San Francisco and the privilege that inhabits it...Brimming with wit and heart, Private Citizens is an impressive debut from a sharp new voice.” — Buzzfeed “Private Citizens is a combustible combination of acrobatic language, dead-on observations and hilarious, heartbreaking storytelling. Tulathimutte has created characters that are hard to forget--first they’ll make you want to strangle them, then you’ll end up falling in love with them.” — Angela Flournoy, National Book Award finalist and author of The Turner House “A spot-on rendering of contemporary San Francisco in all its numinous hippie- hipster- techbro- burnout- activist-ridden glory. But it is the book’s style that makes it stand out. Tony Tulathimutte writes sentences with a reckless verve that reminds one of the best of David Foster Wallace. He’s a major American talent.” — Karan Mahajan, author of Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs “If Evelyn Waugh and Tom Wolfe had a baby, one who wrote sensibly about the subset of people that Dave Eggers has written about whimsically, that baby would probably be Tony Tulathimutte.” — Paris Review “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. It enchants, entertains, sometimes makes me chew my nails in dread, sometimes makes me laugh my ass off, and never, ever doubts my intelligence.” — Benjamin Hale, author of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore “[A] razor-sharp debut...Witty, unsparing, and unsettlingly precise, Tulathimutte empathizes with his subjects even as he (brilliantly) skewers them. A satirical portrait of privilege and disappointment with striking emotional depth.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Tony Tulathimutte is a virtuoso of words... [his] writing edifies and entertains in language that’s highbrow yet unwholesome-gourmet junk food, like the cereal-milk-flavored soft-serve at Momofuku Milk Bar.” — Vice.com “A funny, unflinching portrayal of young people today, nasty neuroses and all.” — Huffington Post “Private Citizens is a freak of literature--a novel so authentic, hilarious, elegantly plotted, and heartbr