Tony Tulathimutte’s novel, Rejection, is available now from William Morrow, so we asked him a few questions about writing, reading, organizing books, and more.
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How do you organize your bookshelves?
Here’s the thing, my buddy Jeff offered to put up my bookshelves in exchange for a six-pack of Coronas, which was really generous of him, but possibly due to the six-pack, one of the shelves keeps falling off the wall. So I organize my bookshelves alphabetically, and I even do that thing where you use a ruler to make the spines flush with each other. (INTJ / double virgo, don’t really believe in that stuff but the shoe does fit.)
All except for that one fucking shelf, which used to begin with Lorrie Moore and end with Darryl Pinckney, and is now just the Slop Shelf, where I just throw any random book I don’t feel like sorting.
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How do you decide what to read next?
I have two piles of books that I alternate between, the Have To and the Get To. In the Have To pile are books I’m compelled to read for some other reason than curiosity, to review them, blurb them, read them for research, read them out of some vague sense it’ll fill a gap in my reading, or because I’ve chained myself to some project like reading all of a particular author’s work (currently on Philip Roth book #24 and intensely regretting it).
The Get To pile is stuff I’m just eager to read based on curiosity, recommendation, or vibes, and at the top right now I’ve got Javier Marias’s The Infatuations, Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament, Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare, Frankie Barnet’s Mood Swings, and Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
Since I read on both print and tablet, these piles are more metaphysical constructs than tangible heaps.
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Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?
If by “piece of culture” you mean medium, it’s easily video games. I’ve been gaming since I was three, from the Atari 2600 onward, with a brief two-year interregnum in San Francisco when I was busier with alcohol.
If we’re talking about a specific work of art, probably Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was my first experience with getting so obsessed with something that I wanted to learn all about how it was made, watch everything by the artist and studio that made it, read all the criticism and every text it referred to, buy bootleg fansubbed VCDs off eBay, wear merch, etc. This is the kind of process that makes you want to make art yourself eventually.
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If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?
Ideally I would be playing music in a sunny room with a dog. Realistically I would probably be working in tech, I’d have 4K+ MMR in Dota 2 and spend my evenings seeing how long I can hold my hand over a candle flame.
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Which book(s) do you reread?
Probably the one thing I’ve reread more than anything else, though it’s been a while, is Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku. It does something I always really enjoy, which is to initially present itself as light fare, in this case a love triangle rom-com about a guy struggling to get into college who’s in love with the widowed proprietor of his boarding house, and over fifteen volumes it expands into something much deeper—not necessarily more complex, but certainly more layered and mature, and it’s reflected in the refinement of the art style over its eight-year serial run.
God why did this come out sounding like Patrick Bateman?
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Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is available via William Morrow.
