Critic Reviews
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Based on 36 reviews on
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK - NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY AND HARVARD CRIMSON AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - Time - Chicago Tribune - The Washington Post - NPR - Variety - Esquire - Vox - Elle - Glamour - GQ - Good Housekeeping - The Paris Review - Paste - Town & Country - BookPage - Kirkus Reviews - BookRiot - Shelf Awareness
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.
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY
Year round iced coffee drinker. Stand-up special "People Pleaser" out now. Previously: Last Week Tonight, Mrs. Maisel, Head Writer/EP Desus & Mero.
Apparently if you (drunkenly?) preorder @jiatolentino’s book in April, you preorder it again in July, and you receive two copies in August. Strange but true! TRICK MIRROR! https://t.co/GQyVwopCPW
Between Two Books is a book club founded by Florence Welch of Florence & The Machine.
The next read on our quarantine list is ‘Trick Mirror’ by Jia Tolentino @jiatolentino Each essay in this collection presents a warped reflection of the self. Tolentino examines how socio-cultural influences have deluded her self-identity. https://t.co/VPYnxMopPG
"Tolentino’s criticism lets readers see commonplace ideas split into their constituent parts, revealing overlooked connections between our daily behavior and the subliminal messages American culture sends us."
"Dazzlingly wide-reaching essays."--Vanity Fair
"The millennial Susan Sontag, a brilliant voice in cultural criticism. . . She remains engaged with her subjects even as she scratches her head and wonders why we do what we do. Even better: She writes like a dream."--The Washington Post
"I worship at the altar of Jia Tolentino, who is undoubtedly the sharpest and most incisive cultural critic alive. Jia is a for-real genius, so damn funny it's absurd, and her ability to cut through all the noise to reveal the heart of the matter is unmatched. What a gift to the universe that, in Trick Mirror, one of the subjects is herself. This book is a master class in how to think about the world in 2019."--Samantha Irby, author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
"In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino's thinking surges with a fierce, electric lyricism. Her mind is animated by rigor and compassion at once. She's horrified by the world and also in love with it. Her truths are knotty but her voice is crystalline enough to handle them. She's always got skin in the game; she knows we all do. Her intelligence is unrelenting and full-blooded, a heart beating inside every critique. She refuses easy morals, false binaries, and redemptive epiphanies, but all that refusal is in the service of something tender, humane, and often achingly beautiful--an exploration of what we long for, how we long for it, and all the stories we tell ourselves along the way."--Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering
"It isn't hyperbolic to say that New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino could be the Joan Didion of our time--writing about feminism, vaping, popular music, religion, and sexual assault with equal amounts of ease and insight. In her debut essay collection, the writer unveils nine new pieces that help cement her place in the essayist canon. She's an expert in the sweet spot where contemporary politics and youth culture meet and make out."--Vulture
"From The New Yorker's beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television. Tolentino is among our age's finest essayists, dissecting the foibles that animate our modern lives with wit, intellectual rigor, and empathy."--Esquire
"Modern American life, especially as lived online, increasingly takes on qualities of insanity, even nightmare, and Trick Mirror has something profound to say about how that happened."--John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
"It has been a consolation these last few years to know that no matter what was happening, Jia Tolentino would be writing about it, with a clear eye and a steady hand, a quick wit and a conscience, and in some of the best prose of her generation."--Patricia Lockwood, author of Priestdaddy