A breakout writer at The New Yorker examines the fractures at the
center of contemporary culture with verve, deftness, and intellectual
ferocity—for readers who’ve wondered what Susan Sontag would have
been like if she had brain damage from the internet.
“A whip-smart,
challenging book.”—Zadie Smith
Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the
conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our
time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original
essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit
and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision,
demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical
dexterity.
Trick Mirror
is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of
self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This
is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it
is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around
the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the
rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the
definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine’s journey from
brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which
insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more
efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s
sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an
instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound
honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst
decade yet.
