📚 Partisan Reading Group – Literary Incels Session 📚

On 4th May at 3pm at Bridge 5 Mill, we will be detouring into fiction and examining the topic of incels with Tony Tulathimutte’s connected short story collection on this very theme, ‘Rejection’.

It’s literary marmite - very distinctive and not like anything else I’ve read. If you want to sample some of it before buying/borrowing the book to see if it’s for you, you could check out the first story from the collection, ‘The Feminist’, which was published on nplusone a few years before the collection came out.

I’d like to pair Rejection with Daniel Kolitz’s Harper essay from last year: ‘Welcome to the Goon Squad’, which I’ve uploaded a PDF of to the drive (as well as a PDF of the many criticisms about the essay). This pairs pretty well with the third story in Rejection specifically.

We want to examine: how is the internet shaping sex, masturbation, romance, self-image and how we relate to one another? Are we lonelier than before? Less lonely?

At the risk of being a character from his collection, it does feel important to include a bunch of trigger warnings, since a book about incels does not always make for pleasant reading. TW: misogyny, racism, eating disorders, threat of violence to women.

Reading list:

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/fiction-drama/the-feminist/

‘Welcome to the Goon Squad’ by Daniel Kolitz
Criticisms of/reactions to the Daniel Kolitz article: ‘Letters by Magdalene J. Taylor, Sascha Cohen’https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nSnUy6L5Sxan1c-EYVayx3OyLKLptF2O