Contributed by Megan Richard
This collection of essays makes you look into yourself at different aspects of your life. It explains different takes on everything that happened in her generation; the good the bad and the ugly.
Book Synopsis
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.
Reviews
Reading Trick Mirror gives me the "where have you been my whole life?" feeling -- a tall draught of sympathetic intelligence in a parched world of digital instrumentalization. - Amazon Reviewer
I think she does an excellent job speaking from her individual experience in a way that opens a door into that experience and creates clear bridges to other people's experiences. - Amazon Reviewer
I was captivated by her intelligence and the way she approached the issues of our internet defined era. It’s been a long time since I’ve read such a well written book that makes you think with every sentence. Her observations of society and self are very honest and very easy to relate too. - Amazon Reviewer
This is an outstanding, rigorously researched and written collection of cultural criticism. I really admired the depth of thought here. I felt like each essay was a master class on how to write cultural criticism. - Goodreads Reviewer
About the Author
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Raised in Texas, she studied at the University of Virginia before serving in Kyrgyzstan in the Peace Corps and receiving her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. She was a contributing editor at The Hairpin and the deputy editor at Jezebel, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Grantland, Pitchfork, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.
Source: Amazon and Goodreads
